Sam White oral history transcript

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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Sam White
Date of Interview: June 20, 1968.
Location of Interview: Residence of Sam White
Interviewer: Evelyn Stevens
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: Roughly 19 years.
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Law Enforcement Agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks, Alaska.
Most Important Projects: Arrested a number of people hunting illegally in Alaska.
Colleagues and Mentors: Earnest Walker, Charlie Goldstein, Johnny Schwegler, Ray Renshaw, Oscar Winchell, Clarence Rhode, Bill Taylor, Enid Thompson.
Most Important Issues: Preventing wasteful hunting of wild game
Brief Summary of Interview: At first, he goes into detail about his many jobs and positions before settling into the Fish and Wildlife service, including piloting an airplane and acting as a lumberjack, during which he got married. He then talks about his early days as a Law Enforcement Agent, along with some of his early arrests and fines, and dealing with the flawed prevailing opinions in Alaska at the time. He then talks about eventually leaving the USFWS and becoming a commercial flyer, and goes into great detail discussing his time as a flyer and the events that happened in his career. The interview is ended by reading a number of articles giving details of similar areas.
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[Note: The following is a transcription from three cassette tapes (six sides) taped in 1968. Several names and places are difficult to understand. There are undoubtedly names and places misspelled but the transcription is done to the best of my ability.] Draft #1, March 1999
Sam White
Aircraft History & Other Experiences
June 20, 1968, at the home of 77 year-old Sam White, former Law Enforcement Agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks, Alaska – left the Service in 1941, retired from flying for Wien Airlines at the age of 71. He was born in Maine, discharged from the Army in 1916, came to Alaska in 1922.
Interviewed by Evelyn (Brown) Stevens
Sam: I’ll start with 1927. Will that be all right? Or a little further back, how about 1925? We left Big Delta. We were supposed to be in Eagle to do a survey. That’s a distance of 275 miles. We packed in with six horses, me and Dan Mackenzie, an exceptionally good man. Took us all summer to go through there and from the time we left the highway at Big Delta, which wasn’t much of a highway in those days, we were eight weeks until we came out at O’Brien Creek (?) on the Fortymile. In that time, we didn’t see a living soul, including an Indian, in those eight weeks. The game was all over the country, just like the African game fields in those days; mountain sheep in their proper places, caribou by the hundreds of thousands, moose – great big ones, a lot of bears, and wolves. We came out at Eagle on the last of September and I had had a canoe shipped there. We sold our horses there in Eagle and came down the river in the canoe and we landed in Circle on the 7th day of October in a blinding snowstorm. We walked from there to Fairbanks; took us a little over a week. There were three people waiting at Circle.
There was no airplane traffic in those days. In 1925 it started a little bit but nobody ventured out much. The people waiting walked out with us and they delayed us a little bit, a man, a woman, and a banker from Texas. That banker was 70 years old! He made the trip fine too. We saw moose, caribou, wolves all the way. It was really good country then, if we could have just kept it that way. I went back to Washington, D.C. that fall. When I went to Juneau, I had made copious notes of the game population all the way through.
The Game Commission had just formed and in 1925 had very few maps on this interior country, so I turned the maps over to them and I had them marked where the horse feed and stuff like that. I went on down to the States and had a little vacation and then went on to Minnesota and later on with the Coastal Geodetic Survey (Coastal Survey). I was gone about a year. I was working with the Coastal Survey. I got a wire from the Game Commission that they would give me a job and to come on back. There were 84 people on their rolls. I would be getting more money that I was with the Coastal Survey and I wanted to come back to Alaska anyway and I had no intentions of staying outside. So I accepted the job and in March 1927, I left New Orleans and came back to 3
Juneau. I worked with old timers like ________ Goddard. Earnest Walker was the executive officer at that time, and a very good one. The assistant executive was H.W. Calhoun, another very good man. Later on, Mr. Goddard and Mr. Walker went to Washington, D.C. on another job. He did a very good job of it too. I took in about three months training there in Juneau then I came up here (Fairbanks) and guided in the Upper Tanana, Fortymile and then I went to Fort Yukon. I arrived there in December 1927. The day I got there it was 65 degrees below zero! I was hung up a week at Circle at the Tanana Road House. It was down to –65 for several days. The whole week never got above –60 so I waited until it got to –30 and I started down the trail and the next day, it was –65 again. I had three days to go but I made it all right. It was awful cold. I got to Fort Yukon and took it slow and easy. There wasn’t too much that a fellow could do. They were more or less hostile, the Game Conservation. These were the “old timers.” There were a lot of Natives there, the biggest Native village in the country, I guess. The Natives were luke warm about the whole business. The old timers at first were hostile and the Commissioner was quite hostile and the town had divided up into two fractions; the old timers and the Mission.
The Mission in general was hostile toward the game laws enforcement at that time. After I had been there for three-four months, they warmed up a little bit. They got a little more friendly. I had some very good friends there. They were a rough bunch. They were only in Fort Yukon about three months in the summer because for them to get to their trapping grounds they had to leave Fort Yukon in July-August. They only came down in May and June. Trappers from the upper territories of Canada came down there. They trapped every kind of fur in the fur line; mink, otter, weasel, wolverine, wolf, lynx, muskrat, and lots of others by the hundreds of thousands. At that time, for every dollar, you had a hundred cents, which went a long ways. In those fur years, fur was worth a lot of money. You could get $65.00 for a lynx. Some of those boys would catch 50-60 lynx at once. They had mink, marten and everything else too. They were doing well. Some of them trappers, one of them alive today, Joe _____________ was well to-do. The Mason Brothers were well to-do. W.C. Curtis was well to-do, but Bill Bryan, he never got well to-do. He drank his up. The trappers never wanted for money. They all had plenty of money to operate on. Joe ___________ was one of the most remarkable of the trappers there. He had his cabins a half-day apart. He went in in the summer to cut the wood. He had no wood to cut in the winter. He didn’t have no dog team. He supplied the cabins. He didn’t have to haul anything around so he could spend his entire time trapping. When he caught $6,000 worth of furs, he would quit. Maybe the season would run for another month but that’s all he needed to make a good living on. He had some money besides and out of that he invested some of it in stocks, principally in Canada. Most all those trappers had money in Canadian banks. Also, some of them had stock in the Canadian Pacific Railroad. They were doing pretty good. The Mason Brothers, the two of them were big husky men, they averaged $16,000 a year. That was quite a lot to make trapping at that time. The fur was awful good. I have some pictures of some of those furs.
I made a trip up to Rampart House, which was on the Canadian border then. Old Dan __________ was the trader there. He was a powerful character. He took in about a quarter of a million dollars every year in furs. A lot of the furs were exchanged for groceries and clothing and the women made a lot of the clothing themselves. They were a well-dressed bunch of Natives and they were well fed as far as a meat diet was concerned. That’s about all they were used to, with a little flour and beans. Most of the rats (muskrats) came from the Old Crow flats. That was a tremendous rat country there. Even the trappers from Fort Yukon used to go up there on the Canadian side. I was up there one time on the 8th day of May and it was 30 degrees below zero. I 4
landed on the ice with a wheel plane. Those fellows, they live tough! They didn’t have no comforts at all. They were out there in a country where there were hardly any trees; mostly marshland, and the river roamed very crooked. They had just the bare necessities of life. Most of them had no tents. They just rolled up a piece of canvas and they moved from one side or the other, whichever way the wind was blowing. Old Curtis, I remember well, he lived tougher than any of them and he didn’t have to either but he wanted it that way. His cooking kettle was a 5-gallon gasoline can and he boiled muskrats in there with the tails hanging over the pail. He would boil them one hour then he would reverse them and boil them another hour, then he would put in a cup full of flour and stir them up. Never more than a cup full and that was his feed for a whole week. I was stuck there at his place with howling dogs on the Porcupine and I came up to his place one time, it was really cold when I got there. I had a bunch of dogs too. A big blizzard came through and I was there three days. I was lying on the bunk one day looking up at the ceiling and I saw a bunch of shotgun holes in the ceiling. I said, “hey, how did that bunch of shot get up there on that loft?” He said, “oh, I shot a damn game warden there.” He was quite a joker.
I was at Fort Yukon until 1928. I got married then. I married a nurse there at the hospital. She had been there just about a year. Then they moved us from there over to Fairbanks and Dufresne was transferred to Juneau. Frank Dufresne, he was one of the agents at the time, he might have been the executive officer. He was stationed in Fairbanks then he went to Juneau. I was here in Fairbanks for quite a while. I’m still troubled with this old dog team that I had. It was kind of silly to have a dog team in a way. Most of your time, when you ought to be doing something else, was taken up taking care of those dogs, feeding them. A good part of your allotment money that you were supposed to travel on went down their throats too. They were a very inefficient mode of transportation to begin with. No matter what you were doing, at that time, it would be the only method that you could use, I guess. It was very unsatisfactory. I finally got rid of the dogs and I had that airplane. Transportation was the thing that the Game Commission needed and didn’t have. They were not going to get anywhere enforcing the laws in this country unless they took to the air. I immediately started getting into the air. I didn’t get much help either. I didn’t even know how to fly. I was totally ignorant on that. I had a little mechanical knowledge but that was about all. But I figured since somebody else could fly I could do it too. It turned out that I figured about right. I got into the air in 1929.
My first plane cost me $3,500 and it was $3,500 down the drain. It wasn’t worth a damn. It was a new one too. It was a little monoplane. You didn’t have much of a choice of airplanes in those days. I laid it down in Fairbanks. I flew it 30 hours and sold it for $500 and was lucky to be alive. It fell out from under me two-three times. I quit fooling around with that thing and I bought the Swallow bi-plane. It was a training plane but it could be modified so it would do the work. I couldn’t go Fort Yukon and back on a tank of gas. I could get over there though. It took me 1 hour and 55 minutes to go from here to Tanana on a calm day. Now you can go there in a matter of minutes, 135 miles. The Swallow turned out to be a pretty good airplane for me because you could land it short and get out short and it would perform in the snow. You could drive it around like an automobile in the snow. It steered good. If you got in tight places, that’s what you had to do, have something you could handle alone. You hardly ever had anybody with you. Whatever you did had to be done by yourself.
I remember one time I broke an oil line going to Kantishna. It was in March. I didn’t have a chance to pick a place to land, so I picked a little swamp and I got in. It was just the width of the 5
airplane and about 300 feet long. It was warm weather. I fixed the oil line and had a little spare oil. I got that all set and that night I pulled it back into the brush hoping the wind would be from the right direction. When I landed, of course, I made ski tracks and they were deep in the snow. That night it turned real warm and got foggy. About midnight it came off cold and a hailstorm come up and the wind blew. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get out of there. When I started the engine, I had to tie the tail down. The wind blew so hard. Those hailstones all rolled into those ski tracks. It was just like being on ball bearings! I took this rope that I had tied to a tree and tied it inside the cockpit and I got in there with the engine running, I revved it up then I cut that rope and then I was dragging part of that rope behind me. I made it!
Another time I was out there with Slim Avery. He was about 68 years old then. He was out there all by himself. He was always in trouble with the game laws. We were nice guys too but he just had problems with us. He raised a big garden. He had 18 dogs. I walked in on him, surprised him as I had done many times before. I asked to see his license. He didn’t have a license. I told him he had been warned several times. This time, you are going to have to pay for it. He thought if he could beat me into Diamond which was only about 100 miles away, he’d get a license. I didn’t particularly care whether he beat me or not. I took plenty of time, warmed up the airplane and took off for Diamond. He took off with his 18 dogs. I had airplane problems and landed in another swamp so he beat me there. I fixed the plane and got over there before the day was out but he had been there and gone but he had bought his license. He had to prove his license to me because I had his furs. He was really a good guy and always glad to see me and would always cook up a big feed. We’d sit down and eat and have pleasant conversation. He was always in trouble with the game laws.
He was a poker player and he would get drunk. He used to take in about $6,000-$7,000 every year. He was always going over to the old country to see his folks. I would see him in Nenana and he would be all liquored up and he would tell me what was going to happen when he got to the old country. He would walk up to the gate, open the gate, the folks would see him and they wouldn’t recognize him and the tears would run down his cheeks when he told me this. He would leave Nenana with $5,000-$6,000, plenty to go over and back and do something for the old folks which he said he was going to do. He’d get into Anchorage and get into a poker game and then he would have to wire Fowler in Nenana to send him the money to go back to Nenana! Anchorage was as far as he ever got on two or three attempts!
He is still alive, about 80 years old now. He still traps a little but not much. One winter out there he was splitting wood, and he cut his thumb off. He told me that for 12 whole days, he never slept and then he got so tired and the pain started easing up a little bit that he laid down and he slept for he doesn’t know how long. He said he went to sleep in daylight and woke up in daylight. He didn’t know if it was one day or two days, or just how long. He never had a doctor look at it because there were no doctors there. He was just stuck right there.
Evelyn: How long were you flying your own plane and having to pay your own expenses?
Sam: About 6-7 years. It costs me a lot of money. That was one of the main reasons that eventually I had to quit to recoup. I had become a proficient pilot. I had spent $15,000 in cash of my own money. I only recovered a very little of that. I sold the first airplane for $500, the next one for $1,000. Money didn’t come quick and easy in those days but it did buy quite a lot of stuff. 6
In the meantime, I had got the Game Commission in the air, against their will. They didn’t have the slightest idea the planes would be any good. I made game counts from the air and they didn’t realize it could be done that way and I couldn’t convince them. They regarded me as being prejudice to pay for the airplane, which I was, all right.
Evelyn: Did the courts support you in those days?
Sam: Half-heartedly; sometimes. I was down there in the Kantisna on a job that could have never been done any other way except by airplane. I was always having trouble with my allotment. They never gave me enough money and then they found out that I was going to do something spectacular. Benson was sitting down there at McGrath and he didn’t have no money. He wired up to me to come down there. I had an airplane under charter then. I had sold my own airplane. He wanted me to get down there just as fast as I could. I got the wire in the late afternoon and I was there early the next morning and I took a load of groceries to him. When I got there, he wasn’t there at McGrath. He was down at Stony River and left me a note to come down there, so I went on down to Stony River that afternoon. We sat down and figured out that since I was there, we might as well do something. We figured we’d go up on the Stony and look things over there. We found two guys with poison. They had 75 marten traps out in April. They had cow moose all over the place, bull moose shot all over the place. It was terrible. One of the guys had a nice 14-year old son there with him. They were driving 22 dogs and working like mad and they were all living on moose meat and beans. We told them we were going to bring them in and they wanted to leave the boy there to look after things and I said, “no you won’t leave the boy here, we’ll take him in too.” I wasn’t going to arrest him or charge him with anything but I told them he was going in. He wasn’t going to be left there alone. They had to shoot the dogs. There was no way to take care of them. We gave them so many cartridges for their guns and Benson stood in one place and I stood in another and we counted the shots as they were shooting off the dogs. They finally got the dogs all shot. He came into the cabin and he was mad. The cabin was small, the floor was sawed out and he had a long barrel, 30-40 Winchester, and he drove that thing right down into the ground in the middle of the cabin clean up on the forearm. Just the butt and the receiver stuck out of the ground. He never pulled it out. He left it right there.
We brought them into McGrath and that time, the Commissioner stood behind us. He gave them a year each in jail. The boy stayed with Benson for 6 months, and he grew like a weed when he got something to eat! Then we brought him up here and he stayed with us until his old man got out of jail. He just expanded into over 6 feet, 200-pound guy. He had the best temper and the best outlook on everything. He had no problems and he went to school. He got along good with all the other kids. I told him he could eat whenever he wanted and he was always going to that Frigidaire. He turned out to be a real good boy. He became a flyer. Last summer (1967) he was killed over at Livengood in a crash.
Evelyn: Where did you come from when you came up here?
Sam: Maine, in 1922. I came up by boat to Seward, took the train to Anchorage. I was in Anchorage two years. I came up with the Coastal Geodetic Survey. Before I came up here to Fairbanks, I was a guide and a lumberjack in Maine. Sometimes I was a scalar. Sometimes I worked with an ax and a shovel for $1.00 a day and finally, I was a scalar for $4.00 a day and eventually I was a big steam log hauler. I got $4.00 a day for that. The hauler had a payload of 7
500 tons. It was the first crawler tractor that was ever made. It was the original with roller belts over cogged wheels. It took four men to run the thing. The steersman was up front. He had from 300-500 tons coming along behind him pushing him down the hills, no brakes. No brakes were possible because such loads as that, you couldn’t brake them. I was steering it. We had an engineer, a fireman, a conductor and a steersman. It was a steam engine type vehicle with tremendous power. Its speed was 4-1/2 miles per hour. Everybody that built a crawler tractor had to pay the royalty until 1917. They had a million dollar court battle but Slumbarde won. They were five years behind him and they copied his plans. They had to pay for it.
I came up here in 1922. I had figured on coming up in 1916 but there was a war on then and I stayed home on account of that. I got into it all right. In 1919, I got out of the Army and I wasn’t in very good condition to come up right then so I had to wait a year or two. In 1922, I was right back to normal. When I went into the Army, I weighed 200 pounds, and when I came out I came out, I weighed 176. They really beat a fellow up in those days; terrible. I am 6 feet, 4 inches tall. I was like a sting bean. They trained you to be mean. Nowadays, they baby them. The way the fed us was terrible. I know, for days on end, when we were right up there and it was raining on us, with mud up to our waist, we never got out of it, day and night, week on end. You just stood there in the mud and crawled around in “no man’s land” and you never got dry for the whole week and you would go back to get something to eat and what they sent up for you was a big milk can full of boiled rice. That’s what you got; that’s what you ate. There would be bullet holes in it, there would be blood spattered on the can; there would be scalp inside the can. You had to eat it. You didn’t have nothing else to eat. Once we got warm bread, we knew whoever was packing the bread got shot and fell over on the bread and warmed it up. We found him! Other times, the cooks would take canned salmon, use a big cleaver and cut the can right down the middle and hand a half can to each man. It was already froze. I never have liked canned salmon since. I wasn’t the loser for this. I felt pretty good about being there and it was just a matter of getting back.
When I took my civil service examination, I got 5% preference for that recon job and that is probably what put me over because I was woefully shy of education. I had knowledge of certain things. I had to gather that as I went along. Then the Coastal Geodetic pulled out completely and they didn’t come back here until about 1941 on Army money.
This country was scarcely mapped at all. Just a few places. About 40% of the country had indifferent maps. The Arctic coast was nothing, just sketches. The Interior, in some places, had 200-ft. contour maps, which wasn’t accurate because there were no control points to tie these surveys to. You couldn’t go by the maps. If you went with a map, you would probably be 15-25 miles out from the place that you were going to because there was that much error. Chandalar Lake in the Arctic was a good example. You had 35 miles out east and west on the map and 15 miles out north and south. When I was flying with Air Force Geodetics, during the war, that work had to be done in the wintertime in the night because they had to have the stars. They made up their star list in Bettles. I said, “that won’t do, where did you take the position from?” “The map” they said. I said, “you’ll be out 25 miles, you won’t get one of those stars.”
((end of Side A, Tape #1))
(start of Side B, Tape #1)
Well, the first night at Chandalar Lake, it was pretty grim there, no trees, no brush, no nothing, just 8
moss and snow. We were there in March. The first night was a beautiful night, rare for that country and there wasn’t one star that came into the instruments. I told them, I’ll give you an assumed position, you make up the star list from that. They hesitated but they had to do something so they made up the star list from that and the stars rolled right in on the minute so that worked out. After that they always got an assumed position on any places in doubt. Then they had these great big bunches of pictures taken from 20,000 feet by the Air Force. They were what they were trying to tie together with the controls. They had to have the controls to put them together or the pictures wouldn’t have been any good. We went all over the country by these pictures.
These pictures were so secret that they didn’t have a name on them. They had a number, but they wouldn’t let the number list go out of Washington, D.C. and nobody could memorize them. Each picture had a number on them and the only way you could tell where it was, was to have seen it and remembered it. I had a good many arguments with them. Finally, it wound up after a good many mistakes, they let me do just what I wanted to do. I would take a look at the picture and I’d tell them that that lake or that bend in the river or that island is over on such and such a place and we’ll go there.
Evelyn: Was this in the 40’s?
Sam: This was in the 40’s, during the war. There was a crash program to map Alaska because the pilots they sent up here were trained to navigate by radio aides and they didn’t have the radio aides in. When the pilots had to go from here to someplace, it was right along a river like Chicken, or Northway. Some of them would wind up over behind the Alaska Range at Gulkana on the Copper River and we’d have to hunt for them. You couldn’t blame them; they weren’t use to this drainage flying like we had to do. Our method of flying and navigation was we used a compass when we had to, and we finally got wise on how to use it. We’d fixed the major drainages in our minds then we’d fix in our minds what drained into the major drainages. If we wanted to go from here to Alatna, all the tributaries, all these rivers, we would just cut them at certain angles and that would take you right straight to the place you wanted to go. If you kept the angles right, crossing the creeks and valleys you couldn’t miss. You had to get a landmark and your first time over you would probably miss a little bit but the next time over you would have landmarks. After you had been over two-three times, you would have your land marks down pat and you could go right straight to any place in Alaska by just cutting the drainages at the right angle. You could fly straight. It wasn’t a system of following rivers or anything like that so much as it was cutting creeks and rivers at certain angles and getting that angle pretty correct.
Evelyn: You said that you finally had to sell the Swallow and you were chartering airplanes. By that time, were you getting funds or an allotment in order to cover things like this?
Sam: No, I wasn’t. I was getting an allotment which was pitifully small. Sometimes, it amounted to $2,500 for a whole year and everything had to come out of it except my salary. I’ll tell you I got a good many letters lecturing me for exceeding my allotments. One time I went down to help out Benson. I figured he had the money because he wired for me to come and I had this airplane on a charter – only paid for it when we were using it which was a good deal for the Game Commission, although they didn’t look at it that way. Anyway, I go down there and we got so immersed in this work. We picked up fellows on the Stony River and then we picked up two guys 9
up on the Tonsona, all trapping in April. They were trapping marten, which were no good, they looked like dishrags. We picked up a whole bunch of fellows and they got some penalties too. That old Commissioner was sure glad to see us clean things up. Even old Hightower came into the office and he said, “you fellows mean business, and by gosh, we’re going to be with you from now on.” When we got this work done, we got into the office and sat down to figure up the bills. We had obligated the Commission for about $1,500. We had done the work as cheap as we could. I asked Benson how much money he had in his allotment. “Me? I don’t have any money in my allotment.” I said, “you ordered the plane!” He said, “well, I was figuring on your allotment!” I told him “my allotment is gone.” We looked at each other and I said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll make up a report from the work that we have done and we’ll send in the bills and then we’ll figure out the finances and send them in later. There isn’t much they can say in light of what we’ve done but they’ll know what our scheme is. They are not silly by any means. They’ll know from the violation reports just why we sent them in first. They’ll be wise to it but there really isn’t much they can say.” We got a mild rebuke. You could tell by reading this mild rebuke that there was some pretty heavy feeling behind it. They wanted the work done, but when they were down at the office, they never seemed to realize what was going on up here in this country.
Evelyn: That was in Juneau?
Sam: Yes.
Evelyn: Who was the Executive?
Sam: Tihume(?) for a while. He was the best executive officer. He stood behind his men real solid. Dufresne was more of a field man than he was an executive officer. At the time of the Stony River job, he was the executive officer and I had irritated him a good many times by exceeding my allotment and doing things without properly notifying the office. In fact, I’d have it all done before they knew I was doing anything. We had telegraph. You couldn’t blame Dufresne for taking issue with this because he had been a field man too and a good one.
Evelyn: Can you remember the year that they finally decided to go ahead and give you funds and believe and realize what the aircraft could do for them?
Sam: That was kind of thrust upon them. When I went out with my own airplane I created much havoc with the trappers, fur buyers, and principally the alien population. There were aliens in the creeks, on the Yukon valley and all over the country that the Game Commissioner had never heard of. My first assignment was to clean up on those aliens and I cleaned up on them. Dufresne knew some of them. They didn’t have licenses. Even government officials were helping them dispose of their furs surreptitiously and making a little profit for themselves by doing that. I got those aliens so scared that after a while, they were making special trips into Fairbanks to get citizenship papers and some of them to get a license. I brought them in, one after another. They didn’t get much sympathy and they were hostile to the United States Government. They were mostly communistically orientated and they didn’t know no more than communism.
I was on the Yukon one time. There were three Finns over there. That was when the Russian-Finnish war was going on. Grant Collins and I went down the Yukon on a big patrol with a boat. When we left here, the water was real high, the ice had just gone out of the Yukon and 10
there were miles and miles we couldn’t get ashore because the ice was piled up higher than this house here along both banks. The river was flooding and the desire was to get into the Novi (local name for the Nowitna River) before any of the trappers came out of there. We wanted to bottle all of them up. On the way down, we contacted this alien who had sold some furs and I knew about it but I couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t have any proof. We took his gun away from him. He had three illegal bear traps and we sunk them in the river. We got a release from him and dropped them in the Yukon and then we went down to the Novi. We got into the mouth of the Novi before any of them had come out so we were intercepting them every day going up the Novi. We were doing them favors and we were doing them disfavors too. We stopped every boat and searched it from stem to stern. They had ducks and geese but we paid no attention to them because they were eating them. We would let them have a little coffee. They were drifting. They were all out of gasoline. We gave them a gallon of gasoline to cross the Yukon, otherwise they might not hit Kockrines. They might be swept past depending on the wind. If they had any babies in their group, we would give them a can of milk for each baby. If anybody was out of coffee or tea, we would give them some.
The first night we spent outside of the boat for four days and nights was on the Novi. There was a cabin with a roof. It was fairly good. There must have been a million field mice on top of it. We moved right in with them! We stayed there. From that cabin, we let the boats come down, then we would hail them in. I’d stand up there with a whistle and when they would go by the cabin, I’d whistle at them and they would break their necks to get in there. They figured that we would be after them if they didn’t. So they would come in and we got one bolt but we didn’t get any contraband. We grabbed their guns that they shot them with. We were skating pretty thin there but we did it and got away with it.
You know an enforcement officer can get away with a lot of stuff if he just goes at it right. You don’t want to look weak, you want to put on a big face. We picked up all the contraband they had and then the last man to come down was John Lassion – a great big tall Swede. Here we had been over a week with no meat to eat. We had given a lot of our stuff away and we were getting down pretty low. Here came John Lassion floating down the river. He was out of gas too. We hailed him in. He was explaining by the time he hit the bank why he had to do all this stuff. He had a half of moose in his boat lying on a bed of grass, fresh killed. Flies were all over it. He was eating off one end and he had three dogs, and they were eating off the other end. He actually had to kill that moose because he didn’t have any other grub except he had 4-5 geese. He had them all rolled up in packages and one of them was for Mrs. DuPhane, the Trader’s wife down in Ruby. He had others but he wasn’t eating them, he was eating the moose. He was starving. He was eating the meat but he needed something else. He’d been that way for 2-3 weeks. We had a tent pitched there on the bend of the river where we could look each way. We cooked up a big feed, applesauce, and everything we had and we fed him up three times within three hours. We fed him about every hour before he decided he had better go. When Glenn was searching the boat, I sat on the bank and Glenn pulled out a package from under the seat and said, “here’s a goose.” I said, “grab the goose.” John said, “that’s for Mrs. DuPhane down in Ruby.” I said, “well, that’s too bad, Mrs. DuPhane doesn’t mean nothing to me.” We grabbed that goose and let the others go by. We ate that goose!
That’s the only time I ever done anything like that. I felt like we were justified, we hadn’t eaten any meat in a week. We were just like old John, he was so hungry for hotcakes and bacon and 11
applesauce, that he was frantic. He ate like a pig! He had it running down his chin. He grabbed all his guns and got the leases signed for every one of them. Even the traders down in Ruby said, “well, if you are going to enforce the law, we would rather see you do it like that than half-heartedly.” That was the attitude. If they had got wise to that situation down in Juneau, they could have had this country tied up tight. It was such a fight that they figured that it was almost impossible to do. All you had to do was get in there and carry a bold face and if you brought a fellow in, which I often did, and then turn him loose, don’t let that get you down, just grab him again and bring him back. He would get discouraged before you would. It was a tough game.
Evelyn: Do you think these people felt that the game was going to always be here and it didn’t need to be protected?
Sam: Yes, there was so much of it. They figured it didn’t need protection. In fact, one of the federal judges told me right on the corner of the bank, he said, “I don’t approve of you arresting these old-timers for shooting a moose in the summer time.” I said, “no, I know you don’t.” He said, “the game was here for the people when the country was opened up. Now the country is opened up, and you should let them have it anytime they want it.” I said, “what are future generations going to do?” He said, “they won’t need game.” That was a federal judge’s attitude! There were a lot of them the same way.
Evelyn: I think they are gradually awakening but it may be too late!
Sam: From the White Mountains on the Beaver to the Crazy (?) Cliffs at Eagle, there is 300 miles of sheep range. Now, there is a batch of sheep probably, 20 to 40. The next bunch occurs up at South Fork of Windy Springs, 75 miles by airline. From there on to the head of the Salcha where the high peaks are doing the splits, that’s the next point, then on the Charley River is the next bunch. That’s the biggest bunch. Then from there, no more sheep until you get to the Crazy Cliffs. The State Game Commission was allowing them to shoot in the White Mountains down there on the Beaver. There used to be sheep on the Twelvemile Summit in my memory and on the Eagle Summit. Nothing there for years now.
Evelyn: Do you think it is because the population has moved in or that it has been over hunted?
Sam: Over hunted without restrictions or proper restrictions. I can remember when I used to be invited to go over to Nome Creek to get mountain sheep. That was just back of Twelvemile Summit. They would get mountain sheep every time they went over there. The mountain sheep had already disappeared off the Twelvemile Summit. I didn’t go with them because I figured I had facilities to go more places where the sheep weren’t hurt. In those days, we didn’t have a real good meat market. Sometimes we would be out of this and that and sometimes, be out of everything. We nearly had to lay up a supply of moose meat or mountain sheep or caribou or something. About every other year, I would get a moose and the next time I wanted game meat, I would get sheep. I would get caribou sometimes, but after you eat that for a while, you don’t want it anymore. You can get a real good caribou by picking one of those big old white-necked bulls, the bigger and whiter the neck the better but be sure he is fat, just rolling in fat. You could tell when you see them. Get them before the 5th of September then you are plenty safe for good meat. The cows and the calves are no good. 12
Evelyn: I got pretty full of moose meat. I’ve been in Anchorage for 22 years. For all the years that my children were growing up, money was tight, I had to go shoot my moose and my husband would get his and I got kind of tired of moose and caribou. I never got a good caribou. My husband would say, “that’s your animal, shoot it!”
Sam: You are bound to get some animals that are not up to par. I was in a country where there were plenty of them. I would watch the moose that came and went in that locality and would pick out the best one and be sure to get them before the 10th or 12th of September. I would pick a big fat bull, the fatter, the better, not a young one. The young ones run around so much that they are tough. They don’t put on much fat and their meat is tough. We never shot cows in those days. If you can get the moose just before the rut when he stops eating and starts running around and the fat starts leaving him, then he’ll be good. When they get into the rut, they get tough and the dogs won’t even eat them. You can smell caribou when they are in the rut, even dogs turn up their noses at that time of year.
Evelyn: With your aircraft, were you on wheels or skis most of the time?
Sam: I was on wheels, skis, and floats, but when I was working for the Game Commission, it was wheels and skis, about evenly divided. I could get into just about any place that I wanted. Later on, I found out that I could drive a herd of caribou over snowdrifts that I couldn’t land on. They would chop the drifts up with their hoofs and I would land behind them. I found that out accidentally. Then one time after I started commercial flying, I got caught in a whiteout. I had soldiers with me and I was in the hills and it looked like there was going to be a crash for sure and a bad one. You couldn’t see anything and all of a sudden I saw a blur ahead of me and by golly, it was a band of caribou and I went in and landed right amongst them. They got out of the way. We had caribou going out from under both wings and I expected to hit one of them but the situation was so serious that I didn’t care if I did hit one of them. It would wreck the plane but it wouldn’t hurt us. If we hadn’t found them, I don’t think we would have lived more than two minutes after that. I was flying a Blanca CH-400. This was in 1943. I was commercial flying, geodetics, nailing the stars down to the earth.
Evelyn: How long did you have to charter? You mentioned you had to charter aircraft.
Sam: About three years. This particular one, I made the contract myself because I knew they would never make it in Juneau. I had the power to make contracts. They didn’t like to do it. I went ahead and made them before they knew about it and I used the plane on one trip and got some results. In fact, I always got results on a patrol airplane. We picked up this Stromberger at Dry Creek, that is only 80 miles out of Fairbanks. That guy had been out there since 1922 and he supplied the market with mountain sheep meat. I knew where he was and I knew what he was doing. I tried to get Noel Wien to take me out there once or twice in his airplane and then something would come up and he would have to take somebody else somewhere else on an emergency. I was getting nowhere.
I knew about that guy ten years before I ever went out there and picked him up. He had all that time to just slaughter the game. Wayne House was here with me and I didn’t mention to anybody that I was going out there. I had this aircraft under charter and Wayne was here and I asked him if 13
he would go out there with me. He was eager to go. I told him to say nothing to nobody and get ready and go. We made our plans and we had to land 18 miles beyond his place. We couldn’t land right at his place cause he would have been alerted. We flew high over and took a look as we went over and we landed in a swamp on Portage Creek in the deep snow. We pitched a tent, and tied the plane down. The next morning we walked over, 18 miles on snowshoes. That was nothing, we did that all the time. We got down in this valley that he was in on Dry Creek and walked down to his cabin.
The dogs started barking and he came out and saw us coming about 100 yards away. He hadn’t seen anyone for three months. He was always alone; sometimes it would be six months and not see anyone. He came out with his hand way out in front of him and I said, “Hugo, this is Mr. House here, an agent. We are here on business and we mean business and we are going to treat you right and we are going to look you over and if you are clean, o.k. and if you ain’t, you are going to have to take the rap. I want to look at that sled.” The sled was in the yard and it had a load on it, canvas covered, and his dog harnesses were all strung out. He had just unhooked the dogs. He went over to his sled and said, “that’s my sled and you can’t look at it.” I walked over to him and I said, “Hugo, we’re here on business and we’re going to do business. I’m the boss while I am here and you are going to do what I say or else you are going to be in big trouble. I’m going to look at that sled whether you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I told him to stand at one side and he said, “yessir, and saluted me.” From then on, he was a model guy because he had been in the Prussian Army a few years back and he had that drilled right into him, the respect for constitutional authority.
I searched his sled and we found violations on it. We found more on the roof, around under the snow. The first pileup was 2 cow moose which was illegal and we found 15 mountain sheep around in the snow and on top of the roof. That night, we were in the cabin making up our notes talking with Hugo, and Wayne said he hadn’t fed his dogs. I said, “he’s feeding them mountain sheep.” I told Hugo to go ahead and feed his dogs, it’s not going to make any difference. You are in a bind anyway so go ahead and feed your dogs. He went out and cut up a big fat ram and fed it to the dogs. The next day we went up to his other place. Wayne went down to another place he had and found some more stuff and I went up to the upper cabin. The next day, Wayne came up and we got a shovel and dug around in the snow and we found 51 mountain sheep heads, some were ewes, some lambs. We found three set-guns that he used to put over his cabin. He said they were for bears but they would get a man just the same. You would never notice the guns. You would walk up to the door and open the door and you would get it. We took them. I told him to take his dog team and haul over a load of contraband over to the tent for us and leave it there. I saved up enough other stuff to be sure to have him in case he done away with that. He didn’t. He took it and left it just as we asked him. Then he went on into Birch Lake to have his dogs taken care of by a friend. I told him to make the arrangements to last a long time because he wasn’t coming back here for quite awhile. He got six months and $150 fine. He had asthma. He couldn’t live in the river valleys. In the summers he went up in the mountains to the upper cabin. There was a ridge above his cabin and the mountain sheep would come down there and post a sentinel and there were caves that they had dug in there. There was some kind of mineral in there that they craved. Hugo had a blind there and you could shovel up cartridge cases by the shovel full, he had done so much shooting from that blind. The mountain sheep would come down over that ridge and disappear right in those caves. It was so depressing, like a morgue. I knew Hugo long before that. He was very arrogant, very aggressive. Every time he would come 14
into my office, he would come in with a chip on his shoulder. He went back out there then he got sick and came in here and died which I didn’t moan too much because he would be out there doing it again.
He was a part of a ring that was furnishing sheep meat on the market here in Fairbanks and it had to be cleaned up from that end. He had a man at Midway on the Big Delta and he had a lookout down on the highway. His name was Tony Caugin. When we were frisking Hugo’s cabin, Wayne found a postcard and it was from Tony Caugin. Tony was somewhat illiterate but he could scratch his name and on this postcard it said “eber thng is alrite on de riber” and that meant that he could bring down another load of sheep meat. After the whole thing was over, everybody was concerned about that ring and Tony. We went out to see him and he invited us to have some moose stew with him and we sat at his table and had moose stew. When we finished, I took the postcard out of my pocket and held it up and pointed it right toward Tony. For a little while, he didn’t notice and then all of a sudden he got his eye on it and yelled, “anybody that said I wrote that card is a damn liar!” I said, “Tony, nobody said you wrote that card but I think you did. When I get into Fairbanks, I have hundreds of your signatures on trapper’s licenses. All I have to do is compare it with the signatures on the licenses and I can tell if you signed it or not.” Well, he said, “I guess I did write it alright.” He didn’t contest it but he sure had a funny reaction to it.
Evelyn: How much of an area were you trying to cover?
Sam: I went from here to Unalakleet, to Kotzebue, to north of the Yukon, to the Kuskokwim.
Evelyn: Did you have the same large area prior to your aircraft?
Sam: No. Literally, there was no specified boundaries. We could work anywhere in the country. I had the Yukon, the Tanana valleys and the Kantishna and the tributaries.
Evelyn: When you first started your aircraft, what did you do, haul your own gas?
Sam: Yes, I made gas caches. I shipped gas out by boat to certain places like Rampart, Dolby on the Koyukuk and remote places. I could get gas in Ruby, Tanana, most of the time, Manley Hot Springs and places like that. Sometimes they would be out and sometimes I wound up short.
Evelyn: What was the year when they finally said, “o.k. you’re right, we’re going to buy you an airplane.”
Sam: They didn’t say it that way. I gave up the aircraft business. I had taken too much of a beating. I had an inkling in the back of my mind that maybe I could precipitate the situation. I wasn’t altogether innocent of that. As furriers came along during the beaver season down the Yukon, the Koyukuk and all over, it took me all summer to seal the beaver on the Yukon and the Koyukuk by the old method of travelling. With the airplane, I could go down and seal them all in less than a week and be back in Fairbanks in the office. It was so ridiculous to do it any other way.
They decided that I was spending too much money buying gas for the airplane. I didn’t have much money in the allotment left at that time of the year so I thought I would just do it the way I wanted to do it. 15
I told them I needed an outboard motor. They sent me three outboard motors. They had all been used. Charlie Goldstein and Johnny Schwegler was up here buying fur like mad and they were travelling by airplane. I started out from Fairbanks to go down as far as Holy Cross to seal the beaver and up to Koyukuk which meant that I would be gone all summer long. Charlie and Johnny went down the Yukon three times to buy beaver and they couldn’t buy them because I hadn’t been there to seal them. You could imagine how they felt and I knew how they felt. That is one reason that I did it. When I got to Tanana, I was on my third motor and it was just falling apart so I couldn’t go no further. I never got to seal a beaver on the trip. I just caught an airplane and came back to Fairbanks.
Johnny and Charlie went into the Game Commission office and they just raised particular hell and told them what they thought of them. They really made a scene – you send a man out with broken down outboard motors. They were traveling by airplane and everybody else traveled by airplane. If I had had an airplane they could have bought their beaver skins the first trip down the river and made a good profit. As it was, they probably bought the beaver skins anyway on the last trip or later on when they did get sealed by other wardens happening along. There would be no profit because they had eaten up all the profit traveling. That was what precipitated buying the first airplane. I maybe shouldn’t be talking this way but that was the truth! That’s the way it happened.
Evelyn: Who at that time was the Executive?
Sam: Dufresne.
Evelyn: Then what type of airplane did they get for you?
Sam: They got me a Monocoupe. It was a hot little thing but it was all right. It was a two-place airplane. They wanted to buy me a Cub. They could get two Cubs for the price of a Monocoupe but I wouldn’t go for a Cub.
Evelyn: Was the Monocoupe low wing?
Sam: No, it was a high-wing monoplane. It had a 90 hp Lambert engine. It was a pretty good engine and it was a wonderful airplane for a two-place plane. It was built strong and very well. The Cubs were fragile and not too reliable. I just went everywhere with that Monocoupe like I did the Swallow but when you flew the Monocoupe, you had to handle it all the time. Even when you had it on the ground you had to stay right with it until you came to a complete stop.
Evelyn: How many years had you been flying?
Sam: When I quit flying, I had been flying 33 years. I had in the neighborhood of 14,000 hours.
Evelyn: So at that time, you had been flying 5-6 years when you got the Monocoupe?
Sam: Seven-eight years, I guess. We got the Monocoupe in about 1938. Shortly afterwards, they got the Fairchild 24. They were beginning to listen to me a little. The results had been 16
coming in. They must have created an impression because it was so different than anything they had ever done before. It was enhancing the prestige of the Commission and taking them places they had never been and rooting out all these aliens out in the river valleys. They must have noticed that eventually. They never told me they did. That guy we took the 21 guns from down the Yukon, I gave him a warning right then to never let me catch him with anything again and the next February after that I went down and checked up on him. He was out trapping. He had $1,500 worth of furs. I stayed with him overnight, ate breakfast with him, then took his whole winter’s catch
((end of Side B, Tape #1))
--start of Side A, Tape #2--
and put him in jail. The courts stood behind me.
Evelyn: When did you leave the Service?
Sam: September 1941. I never went back. When I leave a place, I’m through with it. Two months later, I was offered $800 more a year to come back. My reaction was that if I was worth $800 more a year to them, I should have had it before I left. I was getting a lot more than that in commercial flying. I was flying for Wien, who were very good friends of mine and I was covering the country and I didn’t have to get shot at either. I never did really get shot at but I had a gun pulled on me two-three times. One time by a woman but I faced her down and she threw the gun into the brush, turned around and went into the cabin and banged the door. I wasn’t after her; I was after her husband. He wasn’t there. He come in later to make an issue out of it and I shut him up quick.
Another time a gun was pulled on me was when I went over to Lake Menchona in March with a dog team. The snow was very deep. Another agent started out from Anchorage. The going was pretty tough for him so he quit at Lake Menchona and came back to Nenana. That is where I ran into a hornet’s nest. I started checking up around the Lake and everybody had more moose than they were supposed to have and they were feeding it to the dogs. There was one old guy there, an old Finn. I found 21 moose heads around his cabin. Eight to ten dogs could eat up a lot meat in the winter. I dug in the snow and dug them up. Most of them were cows.
He was out at his spike camp on the Muddy River so I went out there and the trail was deep in the snow. I was on skis, between the dogs and the sled. I didn’t have a gun but when I got near his cabin, he had a 30-06 Winchester, 94 model, leaning up against the wall outside the door. When the dogs barked, he came out and looked up and down the creek and then he looked at me and then he grabbed the gun. I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there. He pumped all the cartridges out into the snow and never fired a shot and leaned the gun up against the cabin and went back in the cabin and slammed the door. I went on over. I had to cross a creek. The banks were high and I got up to the door and knocked on the door and he bellowed, “come in.” I was a bit leery to go in but I did. He had a calf moose killed that morning lying on the floor. I said, “where’s the old cow?” He said, “oh, she’s just out back of the cabin.” He had killed the cow too.
When I come back in, there were five dog teams ahead of me breaking trail. We brewed tea and coffee along the trail. We got into Nenana and they all got a month each, and $150 fine. They 17
gave more sentences back in those days. Did you ever hear of Old Mrs. Hyde, the Commissioner? She was a wonderful old lady. She didn’t make much money and what money she made, she put into mining claims. She said she had a good day, she’d made some money.
When I brought those fellows in, there was a fellow by the name of Nolan. I went down to the pool hall that night and of course, in Nenana, that was all they were talking about right then. That was a big thing there. Five guys went to jail in one day. Old Nolan was playing a game of pool. He said, “I’d like to know what that old hen would do to me if she ever got me up there.” Everyone heard him say it and everyone laughed. A year later, I had him. He did go afoul of the law. I had forgotten all about what he had said earlier. I took him in to Mrs. Hyde’s court. She read the warrant to him and she said, “what do you plea?” He said, “oh, I done it all, I deserve the max. She took her glasses off and said, “now you are going to find out what the old hen is going to do to you!” I just about fell through the floor! Nolan thought that I had told her but I never had because I never thought of it in between times. Somebody had told her, all right.
Evelyn: Who was the Executive when you left?
Sam: Dufresne. He passed away. I knew him from 1925 on. He made more money writing than he did on salary. He was quite a writer. He wrote several books and he wrote for Outdoor Magazine. He was assistant editor for Field and Stream after he left the Commission. He wrote stories for them long before he left the Commission. He was a very successful man. He had the first chance and the best chance to buy airplanes. We needed this transportation and I had broke my neck to convince him that that was what we had to have. They allotted $30,000 to the Game Commission to buy transportation vehicles. With all the stuff that I had proven, so what does he buy? He buys three motor boats, $10,000 each! He could have bought a Stinson, Jr., a first class airplane then for $7,500. The hitch was the boat yards were having a hard time during the depression and Coolidge was a boat builder in Seattle and he needed a contract. So he built three boats. They called them “fox boats.” One of them went over on the Kuskokwim, got there just in time to get froze in and pulled up on the bank and never taken off the bank. One of them got here and people took it from here and went down the Yukon about as far as Ruby, went back up to Fort Yukon, put in on the bank and there she laid and rotted forever. It was never put back in the water. It never got to its destination. They would run the engine full blast and all it would do was plow water. There was no speed to them and you couldn’t go nowhere. They drew lots of water and always running up on gravel bars. I never got in any of them. If I had, I’d been so mad that I’d probably quit right then!
Evelyn: I guess things haven’t changed too much, Sam. Did you ever have any minor accidents?
Sam: Yes. My first crack-up was in June 1935, down the river sealing beaver. Fortunately, I had them all sealed and they wanted me to come down to Kaltag. I went down to Kaltag and landed on that bar and the wind had drifted the silt over it. There was nobody there to tell me that it was dangerous and I flipped over on my back. I wrecked that airplane but it was rebuilt. It was the Stinson, Jr. on contract. Then I knocked the landing gear off of a Blanca up at Point Hope. That involved some bureaucracy too. That was on my own, not with a government agency. That model Blanca had a very poor landing gear. It would never hold up. Wien had them and they knocked them off just as fast as they could. There was another gear that was capable of being 18
installed on that model but it was from another model of Blanca. It was a Goodyear but the CA would not approve of it because it was not made for that model. It had not been engineered for that model airplane although they were practically identical. They would not license it for that plane so I had to put on the old one. It didn’t last long. I finally got it back here at great expense and I put the other gear on and never said a word to them. It worked and I never knocked that gear off again. That bureaucracy is something else, just unwieldy. The folks that are running it, they can’t do nothing about it so the only thing to do was to stick your neck out and keep your fingers crossed. That’s the plane that I was using when I was in the whiteout.
In 1940, we got two Fairchilds in Hagerstown. Ray Renshaw and Glenn ________ were flying by that time. They had a meeting in Anchorage and I was down there putting that Monocoupe together and I attended the meeting. At the end of the meeting, Dufresne asked for some ideas from each one of the agents that might help the Commission. He saved me to the last and I thought he was going to pass me up. When he called on me, I proposed that they take two or three of the agents that were capable and wanted to fly and give them some training at Game Commission expense and buy airplanes for them, just like they bought dog teams and boats. It wouldn’t cost no more in the end and the results would be much greater. With the exception of two young fellows who wanted to fly, there was absolute stunned silence for about two minutes. Then Dufresne said, “well, that was a dilly.” The two fellows that wanted to fly applauded immediately and it created kind of an embarrassing situation.
Evelyn: How can you remember this far back and all the details? I can’t remember things from day to day or that far back. I have to write notes to myself.
Sam: You know some people, when they get old, they can’t remember things that happen immediately but they can remember things back 30-40 years ago. Did you ever notice that?
Here are my notes on the Stromberger case – pleaded guilty, five counts, sentenced to six months, fined $150.00. That case didn’t make much of an impression on people until I got to the set-guns. Then you should have seen the people stiffen up when I laid out the set-guns and told the story.
Evelyn: At these court hearings, did you have a lot of people coming in?
Sam: On a case like that, there would be quite a few. It was only a hearing; not a trial and he plead guilty. There were quite a number of people in there. The other evidence didn’t make much of an impression but the set-guns did. You could see the change right then. From then on they were dead set against him. It took something drastic like that to endanger human life to change them over.
Evelyn: O.K., you said you got a Fairchild 24 in 1940?
Sam: Yes, the factory was to let us know when they would be ready for acceptance and Ray Renshaw and I were going back to pick them up. His was a ranger-powered model and the one I was to pick up was a warner-powered model. We went back there and they didn’t have them finished. They had barely started on the one I was to pick up. I was kind of glad they didn’t have my far along because there were some things I wanted put on it and it was easier to put the things on as they built it rather than add later. I outlined what I wanted to one of the superintendents 19
there and he said, “I’ll tell you mister that you will never get this stuff put on from this factory because we got a tough inspector right here in this factory and he won’t let you get away with nothing.” I said, “alright, where is this inspector. I want to talk with him.” I didn’t get the chance to see him. He happened to be out right then. They took the things that I wrote down and explained to him and made little drawings of them and they asked him about it when he returned. I wasn’t there but he said, “well, go ahead and put the stuff on for him. I don’t know what he wants up there. I’ve never been to Alaska.” When I returned, they were almost taking off their hats to me. He was a pretty reasonable inspector after all! One of the things that I wanted was just a simple parker valve put on the bottom of the oil tank so I could drain the oil in the wintertime. If you put in on the end of a drain like most of them did, hanging down below the tank, then the thing froze up. If you could put the valve right up near the tank then it stayed thawed out. You could drain the oil immediately.
We came across the country together to Seattle. He came up the Inside Passage and I came up through Canada. There was no highway then. From horizon to horizon, you wouldn’t see anything but timber and mountains. Gasoline at Fort Nelson was $2.75 a gallon. I had to have 60 gallons. I came up later in an airplane of my own and I had to pay $2.75 again only this time I needed 120 gallons. Gasoline here in Fairbanks usually ran around 50 cents. I paid $2.00 a gallon at Wiseman frequently. I filled my tanks right up and I would come back here and I would have maybe a half tank.
You know Oscar Winchell? He was a famous flyer up here. I was in McGrath one year and he was station manager for the Consolidated at that time and he was doing some flying too but mostly he was a real sharp station manager. There was a fellow came through from Bethel and he was flying a Voyager. He had two 12-year old kids with him, a boy and a girl. It was in the winter, about March. Oscar and I happened to be near the gas pit when he was gassing up. He had a little pad of paper and he had been figuring on it and he said, “I need just so many gallons and don’t put in any more. I don’t want it full.” I said, “you’re going from here to Anchorage and the weather is spotted and I know how much gas you need.” So Oscar chimed in and he told him that he had better fill it up. He said, “mister, I was flying B-29’s during the war and I know what I am doing.” Well, he took off to Anchorage and when he was down on the runway, revving up, we debated about going down and having one more try at it. He didn’t make it to Anchorage. He went down in a lake and had no emergency rations. They were fortunate enough to be near a trapper’s cabin there on the lake. He didn’t know where he was with two children with him. Fortunately, the weather wasn’t too cold. That was the answer we would get when we would try and give new pilots advice. They thought that since they had flown Thunderbolts, B-25’s, and B-29’s or something during the war, they knew what they were doing. Consequently, we got out of the habit of offering advice to them even when we would see them doing wrong. It was a week before they were found. They were pretty hungry when they were located. This was in the late 40’s. He was on wheels, which makes for a tough lake landing.
Evelyn: How did you handle your maintenance all through this period of time when you were doing this on your own?
Sam: When I was doing it on my own, I had local maintenance men around at terrific expense. I had to have good maintenance and it developed into almost a proposition where you were just swapping dollars. Before that I use to make pretty good money but along the last, it was just 20
pretty much swapping dollars. You couldn’t get enough for your aircraft per hour to take care of the maintenance.
Evelyn: After the Service started purchasing aircraft, did they have a hangar type thing set up for maintenance.
Sam: When I left the Game Commission, they just blossomed right out into a full-blown aviation program. Which led me to believe they were just waiting for me to get out of the way. They got a lot of surplus airplanes. After that, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t last long on the Game Commission on planes. We got the Monocoupe in 1939 and in 1940, the Fairchild, and in 1941 I was through. I didn’t reap much of the fruit for that victory.
Evelyn: Could the beginning of the War have had anything to do with that expansion in any way?
Sam: No. It didn’t have. They had a live wire in there who could fly by that time – Clarence Rhode. He was a pusher and he liked to fly. He was good at it. I knew Clarence well. We made a lot of trips together.
Evelyn: You were no longer working with the Bureau when Clarence came?
Sam: Oh, yes. He worked with me quite a while. When he first came up here he wound up at Eagle. He come down the river. He couldn’t fly yet and then we worked together. He got on with the Forest Service first then finally with the Game Commission. We made several trips together. One of them was the International Boundary Patrol where we rounded up quite a number of people. We worked with the Canadian Mounted Police and then I soloed the man, gave him his instructions. He had some other flying time but I don’t think he had soloed. It didn’t cost him for instructions for I instructed him and soloed him and arranged for his private license. It must have been in 1940 because that fall I was through. He wanted to fly awful bad so I gave him his chance. It would have cost him a lot of money to get all that instruction. He just didn’t have it, he had a family.
Evelyn: I’ve been under the impression that basically he is the one who pushed so hard to force this continued growing.
Sam: Yes. You are right. I didn’t see much of that because when I got out I lost track. I got so busy. I started flying for Wien immediately. I flew for him for four years and then I quit them and went on my own for quite a while. I can’t remember how many years. Then I got so damn tired of flying that I came home and I sat down in that chair and I said, “I’m not going to get out of this chair for the whole winter.” I hadn’t been idle for more than two weeks and Wien’s man came up and said, “we want you to go flying for us again.” He said, “we have people who can take them out but they don’t bring them back all the time and we want to get another old hat on.” I said, “well, I’m going to set out this winter but come May I’ll go to work for you.” I sat around and sort of took a little vacation. Then I worked for them in May and worked for them until I was 70 years old. I am 77 now. I think I was 71 when I retired.
I had one of the toughest places to go to. I was staying at Hughes on the Koyukuk and I had that 21
Indian Mountain to go through. It was a 4,000-foot mountain right in front. It was on a 14% grade. There was no way of getting out of there. When you started in that canyon, you landed uphill. There was no way to turn around. You couldn’t turn around because you were right there with a wall on both sides of you. I used to go in there with a Cessna 180 with a 17-knot tail wind. The black bears were thicker than the devil in there. They are too thick everywhere. You never thin them out. In Maine they had a bounty on bears. When I was 14 years old, I was catching and shooting bears to receive the bounty - $5.00. I was getting $5.00 for the skins so that was $10.00 a bear. I would get 5-6 every year. That was a lot of money in those days. Then they took the bounty off and they allowed anybody to shoot a bear anytime they wanted to. They weren’t protected at all. They have just as many bears today as they had then, so what’s the score? The bounty system does no good as far as black bears were concerned.
Evelyn: When you were way out in the boonies and you were flying your own plane, the Swallow, you had no warming facilities like a big heater. How did you keep your aircraft warm?
Sam: Plumbers fire pot. It is like a gasoline heater. It throws a concentrated blue flame, a tremendous amount of heat. It would take about an hour at –45 below to warm up a good-sized motor. We would cover the motor with a tailored cover so as not to lose any heat. You would have to stand by and watch it every minute. There have been quite a lot of airplanes burned up left unattended. About every week you would have to clean the fire pots out otherwise they would go out, again, then shoot up a high long red flame instead of a short blue flame.
((end of Side A, Tape #2))
--start of Side B, Tape #2—
Evelyn: Now the Swallow was a fabric type aircraft and the Monocoupe was a fabric and so was the Fairchild. I guess it wasn’t until around the War that they really started coming out with metal.
Sam: They had an all-metal plane up here in 1929. Wien had it, a Hamilton, a 7-8-place plane. It was the one Ben Eielson got wrecked over in Siberia. The Russians had some planes that were made at that time that were all metal. Later on, in the early 30’s, Nat Brown came up here and he had an all metal Fahlin, low wing. The all metal plane wasn’t anything new in the 30’s but it wasn’t real common. The low wing wasn’t much good up here. You lost performance on takeoff because the wings were too close to the ground. If you had to land where there was a little brush like willows, the low wings would clip the willows. Freight drops on them, people would walk on them. I was down at Ruby one time with the old Swallow and a local character, an Indian, come out and wanted $1.50 to help gas up. I was gassing up and I told him that I didn’t want him around the airplane. I was gassing up for myself. I was pouring in a can of gas and I felt the airplane trembling and I heard a crash and I looked over and he had walked on the lower wing and he put both feet right through. There he was all tangled up in the lower wing. I jumped down and pulled him out and he still wanted $1.50. I booted him off the river. Then I had to cover that wing with canvas and I got to Tanana and had to cover it again and I finally got it into here. I took canvas and drew it around tight, just as tight as I could and sewed it on but the canvas got lose before I got far. I could see little pieces of fabric that was beating up and down. It would come out from under the canvas and float off behind. There was a big hole when I got to Tanana. 22
I had to stay there all night and patch it up again and I froze it on with water. That ice lasted until I got to Minto Flats and then it started to evaporate. Pretty soon, I was losing some more fabric. I finally got it in to Fairbanks. I wouldn’t dare try that now.
Evelyn: Have you ever had any other experiences where you’ve had airplanes falling apart on you?
Sam: One time I started out from here to go to Tanana and something went wrong with the motor. I came back and found that a primer line had broken. We fixed that and I just got over the hill there and something went haywire again. I called them back a second time and they fixed that. I got over the hill there and the doggoned stick came right out of the socket. I looked down there to see what could cause the stick to come out of the socket. The socket was made in two pieces. It had a little thin bolt to hold the pieces together and the bolt had broken. There was just a little stub sticking up. I ducked down and was flying with the stub and I was steaming all the time. I was too mad to turn back. I got down there and somehow I managed a landing on that Tanana field with that stub. I don’t how I did it because when I had a firm grip on that, I couldn’t see up ahead. I had to have my head down in the cockpit. I made it out and just went and got an ordinary stove bolt and made the hole a little bigger. That bolt stayed in there for years. I don’t think I ever did change it. You had to be able to do everything yourself because if you didn’t, you would get stuck somewhere.
I was down in the Tonsona area and Benson was with me. We were checking out a trapline and flying right over the tops of heavy timber following this trapline and we were going to land on a lake. Just as we were over that timber the motor started acting up so we headed for the lake. We pitched a tent, the wind was howling. One of the little bolts that goes through the rock-around, that holds the up and down push rod had broken and let loose that socket in there. That socket had dropped out so the push rod was jumping up and down in there with nothing in there to push against. The exhaust valve wasn’t opening. I got to fooling around there and found out that the bolts that held the cowling on, there were four of them, were the same size length so we put one of them in and our troubles were over. Three bolts would hold the cowling, and one bolt held the rock-around. We were out for a week after that with the same airplane.
Evelyn: Did you find that these older type aircraft seemed to be more sturdy, maintenance wise?
Sam: Yes. The aircraft were, the engines weren’t. The engines were no way near as reliable, but they weren’t as complicated either. They gave us quite a bit of trouble. They didn’t have the metal in those days that they had in the later engines. They turned the engines up to 1750. We thought that was fast. A little later they turned them up to 1850, a little later to 2200, then 2650. We just couldn’t believe that. You felt like pulling way back on the throttle, scared you to death. We found out that if you turned them up just the way they said with the right manifold pressure, the engines would last longer that way. The operating temperatures were just right. An aircraft engine is made up out of a lot of alloys and each one of them has a different expansion co-efficiency. One alloy will expand a lot more than the other will, consequently, when you put the engine together before it is ever run, they leave a little tolerance there. When you start the engine up they run rough but as they get up to operating temperature, they begin to fit then you have a smooth running engine. 23
Evelyn: Did you ever have any trouble when you were flying with any of your passengers?
Sam: Yes, two or three times. One guy thought he was going to take over and land for me coming into Eagle during a very windy day. We came down the hill; we didn’t have a field. It was just a makeshift. The wind was blowing and he was not going to land but he was also under arrest for illegal trapping. I just showed him the cold end of a 22 automatic pistol right under his jaw and he found out quick and I went ahead and landed.
I was in a village one time and they said they had a passenger that they wanted me to take out. I was a little suspicious and asked what was the matter. I told them I had all the load that I wanted to bother with. They said, "well, this man is sick and we want you to take him out.” I told them that if he was sick, that was different. I would leave some of my gear and take him. Come to find out, he was crazy but they weren’t telling me. I didn’t find that out until I got him in the air. He chewed the arm off one of the windowsills. He kept chewing on that and shooting off his face. I had a pretty husky passenger in the back seat and he saw what the score was right away. He didn’t let him get out of control. I handed the fire extinguisher back to him.
When I was at Hughes, they called up on the radio one day and said they had a man over there going off his rocker and wanted me to come over and get him. I said, “no, if 40 men there can’t control him on the ground, I can’t control him in an airplane.” So, I wouldn’t go over. The next day, they decided to keep him because he was a cook. The trouble was they had gotten on a big drunk and he had a touch of “DT’s.”
Evelyn: Early on, you were talking about how you navigated by memorizing the drainages, etc. There were no radio aides or nav aides of any kind at that time, were there?
Sam: No. There were a few at the beginning of the war. The routes from here to McGrath and from here to Nome was covered and that was about it. They were putting in a route to Koyukuk up to Bettles but that didn’t do you any good cause that only covered a little bit of the interior. The Army flights were longer than that. To begin with we had no radios at all. We just had the bare airplane; no instruments, no nothing. I never made enough money to get an instrument rating. I never wanted one anyway. I didn’t like the idea of a guy sitting back where I couldn’t see him telling me what to do. I’d rather do it myself. They are good guys, don’t get me wrong. You know Bill Taylor that was killed there in Anchorage when the earthquake fell. He was a good friend of mine. I knew him from the time he was nine years old. He was up here just about a month or so before that. We had a nice visit here. He was a good man. He was an expert in air traffic business. I saw him change from a boy to a man and a real good man too.
Evelyn: Why don’t you, between now and fall, when we hope Theron (Smith) and Ray (Tremblay) can come up, if you think of something, why don’t you just jot it down as it comes to you. This is filling up some tremendous holes. I hear there was a newspaper article on you recently. Do you have the dates on that? Oh, yes, March 13, 1968.
When I was telling you earlier about working for the Coastal Survey, when they came up here to work the next time, which was in 1942, they were going to do their work with airplanes. They had never tried it. They requested me for their pilot and I happened to be working for Wien so 24
Wien got the contract. I was flying the same personnel that I worked with in the earlier days. For several years, I flew them. As a result of that, the Air Force Geodesics wanted me for a pilot so Wien got those contracts too until they goofed up on them and then I got the contract for awhile. Then I got the contracts for the Coastal Survey. I flew them down to Bristol Bay, and all over the country on my own. That was when I was running my own outfit over in Kotzebue. I did pretty well after several years but maintenance got me in the end. I just couldn’t make out anymore. The price for airplanes never went up but the price for maintenance did go up. I used to get underbid consistently. They knew what I would bid. I wouldn’t bid any cheaper than I had ever flown. I wouldn’t put in a cheaper bid just to get a contract. I would get underbid but I would wind up with the contract anyway. Those fellows back in Washington, D.C. wanted me on the job because I’d never had no accidents and nobody had gotten hurt.
Then they started getting a new crop of commanders. The old crop of commanders that I knew were retiring and they were getting a new crop. They thought this cheaper flying would be the real ticket. That year they accepted some bids from the outside from fellows that didn’t even have airplanes. I did bid but I didn’t get the bid. Jack Peck in Anchorage underbid me. I let him have it. I had this deal with the Geological over on the Kobuk and it was a better contract all the way through. I got by that summer just fine. The next year I was back with the Coastal Survey. They had wrecked too many airplanes and broken some legs and the commander and the pilot got killed in the park. When a Coastal Survey officer gets killed, that is worse than killing a hundred men. They take that to heart terribly when a Coastal Survey officer gets killed. They found him in Bristol Bay. They had a light Taylorcraft on the job. The pilot was all right but that Bristol Bay area was no place for a Taylorcraft or a Cub either. They tried to take off, got into a wind and turned over. They floated five miles out into the ocean beyond Hagemeister Island. They floated back by the Island and into Togiak Bay and they floated so close to the Island that his passenger said he was going to swim to the Island. He said, “I’m a good swimmer.” The pilot tried to get him to hang onto the float. Just the bottom of the float was sticking up, the engine was underwater. The fellow started swimming and he didn’t make it. He drowned. The airplane floated back into Togiak Bay and hung up on some rock. They picked it up the next morning. The pilot was still alive in all that cold water. That water was cold in the Bering Sea! I don’t know how he ever made it, a night and a day but he did.
In all the flying, I did more flying for them than any one pilot; I never ever scratched anybody up. I was awful careful not to do that. I did take some chances. You have to when you are flying. You got to figure it out and then do just the way you figure it.
Evelyn: When you didn’t have any radio aides, what did you do about weather?
Sam: One day there at Point Heiden, little Gene Effler was flying Stinson, Jr. and he went out and he had two men with him. I had been to this lake that he was going out to. I had three working parties out and I saw the storm coming up. I told the boss that I thought I’d better get my men in cause it looked like a bad one. They come up quick there. I just got my men in and the wind was blowing 50 miles an hour. Then this fellow didn’t come in. He was out at the other lake. The winds got stronger to 65 miles an hour. I was the only one that had an airplane there that could do it. It was a strong one, really put together. I had all kinds of gadgets on it. There were no trees down there. It was dark, raining like mad and the wind blowing 55 mph, with gusts up to 65 mph. It was reported right there at Port Heiden radio. I told the boss that I would go out and look for 25
him but I didn’t know if I could bring him back or not but I would try. I could follow the shoreline; I could see the surface of the water and wet mud. I had to go eight miles across the tundra to this lake and I couldn’t see nothing much. I took a compass course for that and by golly I came right out over the lake. I had been there before. I first circled around the lake and I didn’t see nothing. The next circle around the lake, I spotted the airplane in the middle of the lake with the floats sticking up. I made another circle and I finally spotted them on the beach. They were able to make a couple of flashes from a flashlight that had gotten wet. There were three of them there. I could only haul two of them out of there. The waves were very high. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I landed. I picked up two of them, the pilot and one passenger. This one passenger had been in three different wrecks that summer. The other fellow, he was Jack Chamberlain. He was a 200 pounder, six feet plus tall and he had been a B-29 pilot during the war. He was very much amazed at the kind of flying I was doing. He said, “one minute you say you are following the river, the next minute, you’re up and down all over the place.” I said, “well, maybe there is a reason for that.” He wouldn’t discuss it. He was so disgusted with it all. I told him to stay right here! Don’t leave this beach! I’ll be right back. He said, “oh, you won’t be back here tonight, I don’t see how you found it this time.” I said, “I’m coming back tonight to pick you up and don’t you leave this beach.”
They had seen five big bears. The grass was shoulder high. The bears would come up out of the grass and look at them then drop back down into the grass. I took the passengers in and the whole camp was out when I got back and they helped me beach the plane. I needed a lot of help with that wind. I went right back and picked up Chamberlain and got him out of there. The next morning I met him outside the tents there. He came over and shook hands with me. He said, “thanks a lot, I have revised my opinion of bush pilots.” I told him that was nice, that his opinion needed a little revising. He was a pretty good fellow when you got to know him but you never got to know him until he needed some help. We had no trouble with the bears. They left us alone. They would come through camp once in awhile and they never bothered us.
Evelyn: I was going to ask you – when you were out on the trails if you ever had any encounters with animals.
Sam: Yes, I had three bear fights; two with grizzlies and one with a brown bear. When a man has a 30-06, you don’t have anything to worry about. If you can get in one good shot, that’s all you need. You run onto them and startle them. A grizzly will jump you. They get offended awful easy but a brown bear, they are placid. We never had no trouble with them. Grizzlies are unpredictable and they can tip over a jeep too. The superintendent's son down at the park had a jeep with a plywood cab on it that he made himself. He went out and parked it up on a knoll with a lot of brush around. He was gone awhile and he come back and he got into the jeep and started the engine. He had seen nothing nor heard nothing and he made two feet ahead and suddenly the hind wheels left the ground, went backwards and was set over two feet to one side. There was an awful racket in the cab. It felt like the cab was coming off. He didn’t know what was coming off. He gunned it again and he was in four-wheel drive and the same thing happened again. He really took off then, something hit the cab but he kept on going. He got down to headquarters and they looked at the cab and there were bear claws all over the outside of that jeep. That bear just grabbed it and pulled it backwards! One bear has the strength of about 20 men. I’ve slept right in their trails. I would just crawl into my sleeping bag and go to sleep right under a tree but I would have a gun right where I could grab it. 26
Evelyn: How long at a time were you out?
Sam: I was out all different times, three weeks, five-six weeks. When I was flying with the Coastal Survey I was out all summer. When I was out with the Geological, I was out all summer. When I was on my enforcement job, we would be out months at a time.
Evelyn: I just noticed this – Centennial Bush Pilot, Sam White. I’m sure you think quite a lot of that.
Sam: You know the paintings of the bush pilots down at the college that were all destroyed?
Evelyn: The ones that used to hang down in Anchorage? They didn’t salvage too many of them. Was your picture in there?
Sam: Yes, from the earthquake.
One morning when we were in Bristol Bay, I took a working party out and we went over to a tent where there was another working party. They had been put out there on the tundra with a weasel and as we flew over this camp, we noticed a great big brown bear sniffing the tent with the two men inside sound asleep. We knew we had to go down there and drive that bear away. We flew low and gave the engine full power and I got the bear going up over the hill, I passed over the tent two-three times and drove the bear up over the hill. When those fellows woke up, they didn’t even know the bear had been there and didn’t even know I had flown over several times. Those light-keepers could sleep soundly. They were the oddest bunch of men you’ve ever seen, those light-keepers. They had nothing to do but lay in that tent until they got a good night then they would sit on the mountain all night and shine their light.
--looking at lots of pictures-- Sam says he has lots of pictures!
Evelyn: This Rampart, is this up in the Rampart Canyon?
Sam: It’s way above that. It’s on the Porcupine. Rampart House is right on the Canadian Border. It is abandoned now. Thirty miles above there is Old Crow on the Canadian side.
Evelyn: The town of Chena – now washed out and into the Tanana.
Sam: Yes. In the beginning they had quite a battle as to whether the main town would be in Fairbanks or at Chena. The reason that Fairbanks won out was that Dean Wickersham, a big politician there in those days owned a lot of ground in Fairbanks and if Chena got to be the town, he would have anything. It was a good thing that it went the way that it did because there is no ground there where Chena is now. The Tanana River, that is what’s menacing this town. It is edging this way all the time towards Fairbanks and it is only six miles away. The Tanana River bed is getting higher ever year. The water level of the Tanana River is three feet higher than Fairbanks. It is swift water above Fairbanks from Big Delta on down. It is very swift and it brings down a lot of gravel and muck and it dumps it where the river slows up right out here. Geological Survey knows all about it and one of these days, the Tanana River is going to be right 27
here in this town. I noticed it and a few old timers had made the same deduction. The rest of them hadn’t noticed it or didn’t care. Now they are beginning to think about it. This was all conducive to the terrible flood that we had last year. It was Tanana water running across the road into the Chena because I recognized the color of it. I can tell Chena water from Tanana water. Tanana water is heavy with silt and it is a certain color.
Some of those pictures were taken back in the 1900’s. I just happened to get hold of them.
((end of Side B, Tape #2))
--start of Side A, Tape #3—
Evelyn: From looking at all these old pictures, it is hard to imagine this place being so active all these years. You kind of felt it had been dormant but these pictures show that to be far from the way it really was. All of those folks, including you, had to be hearty souls.
Sam: They took $300,000,000 worth of gold from Cripple Creek and they probably took a like amount out of Gold Stream then they took a lot more out of the quarry.
Evelyn: Here’s a picture on the Stromberger case – 2 cow moose, 2 caribou, 51 mountain sheep, 3 set-guns and 2 market hunters, December 1939. Those were the good old days, I guess. At least when you apprehended somebody you could bring them into court and not have it thrown out.
Sam: We used to have some funny instances in court. One place I brought a fellow in and the Commissioner had the warrant there and said, “are you guilty – you must be or you wouldn’t be here – you get three months!”
Did you ever hear about Mt. Spur blowing up a few years ago? I was right there, 35 miles away. We were on the other side and it wasn’t too bad there. We didn’t get ash there. I was flying from Iliamna to Whitefish Lake every day hauling gasoline to helicopters. The day before it blew, I was smelling battery acid all day long and I thought my battery was haywire. I checked things out and everything seemed to be all right. I opened the window and the odor got stronger and that morning about 2:00 a.m., Mt. Spur blew up. It was sulfuric acid from the mountain that I was smelling. I didn’t know it at the time but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. We didn’t see it blow because there was heavy fog and later in the day it cleared up. The smoke and steam reached an altitude of 40,000 feet. Then I was making a trip down to Iliamna and I detoured over to get near it and I could see what looked to be a rock, a glowing object bigger than this house. It went into the air with a terrible rumble. It was red hot. It came down in a snow bank. When that hit the snow bank there was nothing to be seen. The whole area fogged in. I looked for that snow bank later when it cleared up, but there was no snow bank there anymore, it had all gone up in steam.
There is a picture of my wife, my sister, and my three boys. One of them is a lieutenant with the State Police in Maine. He was in World War II and was wounded, recovered and went back and was in the last battle they had in Italy. He was over there three years. His name was Allen, the youngest. Vernon wasn’t in, but Jessie was in England for 1-1/2 years as a radio technician on the 28
aircrafts and he also had to unload the wounded and the dead out of the airplanes. It affected him pretty bad. He doesn’t want to go near an airplane and he won’t do radio work anymore. I had two sisters, but the one in the picture; she and I are the only two kids out of ten that are alive. My last brother died a little less than a year ago. He and two of his sons died within a week – Emphysema. Maine was a miserable climate.
Evelyn: Did you do any trapping?
Sam: I trapped the first year I was in the country. This was before I went with the Service. I was with the Coastal Survey in the summer and in the winter I had nothing to do. There were no jobs in Alaska the first two-three years I was here. I came here in 1922 but didn’t go with the Bureau until 1927. The Bureau was just two years old when I went with them. They hadn’t had a chance to get started. They had very little information about interior Alaska. They were just organizing, that first two years. They were doing some work too but they were handicapped because they had no information. I never had any enforcement experience up to this time but I had grown up figuring that the law was the law and it ought to be that way because that’s the only way you could maintain civilization. I didn’t get much training; I mainly just struck out on my own. I was shown how to do the paperwork, etc.
The caribou used to go right through town here. They used to block the highway so you would have to wait for them to get on through. They would block the airport and you would have to wait for them there too. I’ve been on a steamboat on the Yukon where the caribou would be so thick that we couldn’t go through the masses of them. You would just go ashore and tie up and wait for them to go on by. If you got amongst them and the antlers got caught in the paddle wheel, then off comes the paddle blades so it was too dangerous to take that chance of going through them. Sometimes, you would be tied up for one-two hours. You would untie, go on down the river and run into another bunch. Countless, hundreds of thousands of them! The biologists thought they were going to starve to death but the millions of them then, they weren’t starving, I don’t know why they should now. Suppose a few did starve to death, what harm would that do? I was out here on the Taylor highway when they first opened it up. I came around a bend, I heard a lot of shooting and there were 30-40 cars up ahead of me all stopped. The doors were wide open, you couldn’t go by. People were shooting, hollering, screaming, caribou tumbling all over the side of the hill, crippling into the brush. They must have killed at least 100 of them there. It was like a battlefield. I saw a dust cloud and a fellow came down from up ahead. He got out of his car and he hollered, “come on up here, there is more of them up here.” They all took off and never touched one of those caribou that they had just slaughtered. I stayed there four hours and no one ever came back.
When I returned to town, I hunted up Jones, a biologist, and I told him about it. I told him that somebody better get up there and do something about that. That is just going too far! He said, “well, I’ll tell you, we got to take 6,000 animals out of that herd this fall and this is the only way we know how to do it.” I said, “you are encouraging everybody to violate the law that you are supposed to enforce.” He said, “well, yes, but we have to do it. We have got to kill that many caribou or they will starve to death this winter.” I said, “they didn’t use to starve to death up here.” I told him that I thought he and the others were all wrong. It didn’t seem to worry the Game Commission one bit that the meat was just left there and not attended to.
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Then at Eagle, there was always a big migration there every spring and every fall. North of the Yukon, there is no closed season on caribou and no bag limit. The tourists would come into Eagle, meet that migration on the north shore of the Yukon and they would shoot it up. The caribou then, turn around and go back. They were cutting off the migration route. It has been four years since there has been a migration across the Yukon because of that. That’s dangerous when they don’t travel because that’s when they begin to fade out. Almost every instinct of the caribou, mating and all, is tied up in the migration process. They have the same problem over in Canada. They got some independent traders in there and they got some repeating rifles and the caribou lasted just four years. They had a super abundance of caribou, then four years later, nothing.
Evelyn: You mentioned earlier that you were on skis. Did you physically use skis?
Sam: Yes, driving dogs. You stand on the skis and the towlines run between your feet. That’s the only way you can keep up with the dogs. You had a sled right behind you, several hundred pounds of it. They had a few people to get killed that way. If you fell down, the sled ran right over you. When things got out of control, I went over headfirst in the snow and left the skis. I used to be pretty quick on my feet in those days.
Evelyn: A picture here - the start of the Tanana-Yukon Patrol by Gren Collins and Sam White. That was in 1937. You had to do that by boat?
Sam: Enid Thompson was a man that was very much looked up to around here. He was deputy marshal and clerk of the courts. I first knew him as a grocery boy. He used to help me a lot when he was deputy marshall. I had one customer that I picked up about once a year. His Russian name was Gregory _______ and he angled it and called himself Pete Smith. He took out a license in each name then he said, “now you can’t touch me, I got two licenses.” I told him that wouldn’t do him any good. I took his licenses because he didn’t even have citizenship papers. I took a set of guns off him. Aliens weren’t supposed to have guns under the old Alaska game laws. I would relieve him of his guns every fall. Then one day I was coming in and Enid Thompson was with me. We met this guy and I said, “I’ve been wanting to catch him on the road and I’m going to look him over again.” We turned around and took after him. He saw us coming and he put on the speed. We drove him into a dead-end wood row. We kept right close to him and Thompson was watching closely to see that he didn’t throw anything out. He finally went as far as he could go on the road. I got out and asked him if he had any guns with him and he said, “oh no, you know I wouldn’t do that anymore, I know better than that now.” I told him to get out of his car, that I was going to take a look. He had a brand new shot gun, a brand new 30-06 and a brand new 22 rifle. I said, “oh, Pete, you big liar!” He said, “this damn country is no good, I’m going back to Russia.” I said, “you tried that once and they wouldn’t have you, you had just better stay put.” He had tried to return to Russia earlier and they kicked him out, they wouldn’t have him back. It cost him about $150 in addition to losing his guns. He had no use for the U.S. government. He couldn’t get citizenship papers. He used to live right where the runways are at Fort Wainwright. That was a moose pasture. I would always watch him closely because he was always poaching moose. I would go out there and relieve him of his guns. The marshall went out there one day and he pulled a 30-30 carbine on the marshall. That was a big mistake. He had more guns pointing at him before he could say “scat.” They brought him in and he got a year and a day in jail for that. He never could get citizenship. 30
Evelyn: Sam, why don’t I read some of these articles into the record that I won’t be able to get a copy of.
Daily Alaska Empire – Sunday, March 23, 1941
Title: Flying Game Warden, Sam White Tells All
The law was spread pretty thin over 100,000 square miles of wilderness in the Yukon and Tanana River basins when Sam White, the game warden, dug down into his own pockets and bought himself an airplane. That was 12 years ago. Even rickety old crates were scarce in the territory and retribution came slowly, if at all, to poachers and alien interlopers who slaughtered Alaska’s valuable game in regions reached only by riverboats, dog teams, or snowshoe trails. “Some of those folks” Sam said, “acted like the whole country belonged to them and I guess it did for awhile. They are learning better now. The law is still spread pretty thin, I guess, but it reaches further and faster than it used to.”
The veteran Alaska game commission employee, first flying warden in this hemisphere, told a story to reporters in Washington last August, that caused considerable prodding and press correspondence of the new Fish and Wildlife Service of the Interior Department. Sam had gone to Washington to ferry back to Alaska a new radio-equipped four-placed airplane, a far cry from the old machine he bought from his own hard earned savings back in 1929. Sam bought the first two airplanes he used. In all, he spent $13,000 for flying equipment, hangars, etc., although, as he explains “the government bought my gasoline.” For several years now, the government has been flying three Alaska game wardens. At first by charter and later through federal purchase.
“Tell the boys about that border smuggling racket you broke up,” said a press agent. “Aw” grinned Sam, who began a career as woodsman at the age of 16 as a guide in the Maine backcountry.
Just Another Trip - It seems that some tough citizens had been poisoning wolves and coyotes in nearby Canada and smuggling their pelts across the border to collect $20 bounties, ordered for predatory beef by the territorial government. The territory had no investigators and called upon the Game Commission for help. Sam flew to Dawson to organize a boundary patrol. “At Dawson, they gave me a Northwest Mounted Policeman to help, Constable, W.W. Sutherland, only a few years out of England. We flew over the backcountry and the trading post, getting the lay of the land. At one of those places, at Snag River, we found 84 wolf pelts. They had been skinned with the leg bone inside, a requirement for the $20 bounty being paid in Alaska. We seized the pelts. Back at Dawson, we got the names of trappers who had bought poison from drug stores then we looked for them in the backcountry. Those fellows would put out strychnine bait and contaminate a whole region rich in animal and bird life. The birds fly off and die and their bodies become new poison bait for animals. One man spreading poison can kill all the animals in a big area. He collects only a few pelts in the animals he destroys. They crawl off and die in hiding or the snow blows over their bodies.
Went in on snowshoes – On Nation Rivers, there were only three men, one of them, a tough Scandinavian we suspected. We cruised the river without finding a place to land. The nearest place was 35 miles away and I went in on snowshoes. I located our man and went back for 31
Sutherland. We brought out a dog team for the return trip. The fellow who had killed out all the animals in that section was leaving with his pelts and what remained of his poison. The Mounty and I took him across the border into Canada. The Canadian laws also prohibit poison and, of course, enforce the law. Too, when they sentence a man he worked it out in the “Royal Woodpile.” Our Scandinavian didn’t poison anymore animals for a long time.
Aliens in the Yukon – Sam told of going after an alien in the Yukon Valley wanted by the Mounties for cache robberies. A major offense in a country where trail food stores may be the life or death for the traveler. The flyer located the man several times in the air only to lose him when he landed. He continued the chase on snowshoes. The fugitive took to the hills. Sam returned to the nearest cabin and borrowed a dog team. The man who went back with him explained the fugitive was crazy. The two finally captured the trapper, took him to the plane and strapped him in the front seat. “When we got the engine started, we had to hurry,” Sam said. It was –30 degrees below zero and a high wind was blowing. I never learned until later that my prisoner had threatened to kill me in the airplane. The fellow kept poking at the instrument board. He threatened to take over the controls and fly himself. The nearest landing place was beside a steep mountain. I had to slide in between two buildings and a grove of trees. Maybe that crazy landing saved my life. It scared the prisoner pretty badly. After we landed, he shouted at me, “just think what would have happened to you if I had grabbed the controls back there.”
Rescue Trapper – On another occasion, a wildlife agent landed on a mountain near a cabin in which a trapper had an ulcerated tooth and was near death. Sam, in choosing his landing place, hadn’t figured on getting off with a load. He broke a ski pulling his ship in the air but managed to land safely at Fairbanks, Sam’s headquarters. They operated on the trapper that day and after he got well, he wanted to give me all the furs in his caches. For most of the year, Sam flies with skis on. Deep snow increases the number of possible places to land. In 12 years of wilderness flying, he has had six forced landings. “It must be frightfully uncomfortable in that cold,” commented a girl reporter, “sitting there waiting for them to rescue you.” “Lady,” said Sam, “where I come from you don’t wait for a rescue, you just tie everything down and start walking.” “Don’t you have a two-way radio in your plane?” “In the new one, yes, but not before,” replied Sam. “But,” the girl retorted, “even the Australian police, I’m told, find it impossible to fly over wild country without radio equipment.” “Maybe it is impossible lady,” said Sam, “but that’s what we have been doing for the past ten years in Alaska.”
--end of reading from the Juneau article—
The following is from the Outdoor Life Magazine, June 1946, page 34.
Wardens with Wings by Rob S. Sanderson, photos by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
--Recent missions have been flown either in two-place Monocoupe, one of which is shown above or in larger three-four-place Fairchild.-- (this is sub-title under picture of Monocoupe)
“The use of airplanes for conservation enforcement work in this age of flight has been hailed as a great new idea, untried, but full of promise. Such is not the case. The idea has been thoroughly tried and has more than fulfilled its promise. As a matter of fact, pilot/agents for the Alaska Game Commission have used planes for more than 15 years and have not only proved that they are 32
practical and economical but have established a remarkable record for safety and efficiency.
When and how did the airplane idea start? In 1929, four years after the Alaska Game Commission was founded, one of its agents, Sam O. White, bought himself an old Swallow bi-plane and began roaring around the skies above Fairbanks, teaching himself to fly. White put the plane on skis, began using it on his patrols and so became the terror of the backcountry poachers. His enforcement record convinced skeptics, and in 1932, Congress was prevailed upon to pass legislation empowering the Alaska Game Commission to purchase, own, and operate planes. Since that time, the agents have been fairly well supplied. Today, airplanes are indispensable for Alaska operations. Without their wings, it would be like working in a horseless cow country. In 1943, for example, a skeleton staff of ten agents and two administrative men were responsible for patrols covering 590,884 square miles or an average of 49,240 for each officer. That year Alaska was flooded with newcomers who lived outdoors and had access to guns. There were men in uniform, men in labor camps, and men in technical corps. The resulting enforcement crises was one of the biggest in Alaska’s history. In speaking of the tremendous job done by its agents, the Alaska Game Commission frankly states: Their work would have been impossible to accomplish without the use of five commissioned airplanes. With many former employees back from serving in the armed forces, the air enforcement fleet will soon mushroom. Three main air bases at Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Ketchikan were already established before Pearl Harbor but the coming of the war in 1941 halted all expansions and retractions set in as personnel was lost. Simultaneously, the enforcement problem increased. Now the Commission is free to move ahead with the backlog of ideas accumulated since 1940. When it published this statement in its annual report, “airplanes flown by Commission officers are by far the most effective and economical method yet devised for enforcing the fur and game laws and for checking on the wildlife in Alaska. Airplanes account for more travel in this work than any other means of transportation. For years, the dog team was the standby for land travel. By 1943, dog team miles fell to 675 for the year, whereas, air patrols covered 120,031 miles.”
In spring and fall when other transportation is difficult or impossible, plane travel is particularly important to the enforcement work. In former years, poachers chose these seasons for their worst depredations knowing they would be beyond the law’s reach in most cases. Nowadays, they can never rest easy for they know that a flying agent may come out of the blue in the wink of an eye.
After White bought his Swallow, one of the first enforcement problems he tackled was that of illegal trap lines. By dog team, it took a full week of hard travel to visit the trapping camp only 100 miles away. With his plane, he could do the job in three hours. A snowshoe trail was easily followed from the air and within a short distance, an experienced warden can tell not only whether the snowshoer is trapping or hunting but
((end of Side A, Tape #3))
((start of Side B, Tape #3)
also what game or fur he seeks. A trap line along the timbered high ridges is set for marten. A line along small streams is for mink and otter. A trail that visits all the beaver ponds in the green vicinity suggests a beaver trapper. By flying low, the warden can tell about how many traps a mile are used and how often the line is run. Law abiding trappers welcomed visits from the Commission’s plane if only to break the monotony of the short Arctic days. Besides, they like 33
assurance that if a flying agent notices the trap lines have not been run recently, he will land to make sure that the trapper is not succumbed to sickness, cold, or foul play.
Wood dwellers in distress or with important information for the agent signals to the plane by placing cut spruce boughs on the snow to spell the desired words, such as L-A-N-D and often lay out an arrow pointing to the nearest spot which could be made to serve as a runway. These spruce bough messages to pilots are common and by their use, information can be delivered to agents even if the signal marker is not at home when the plane arrives. In return, the pilot drops notes or late newspapers to these isolated humans. Such patrols perform the mission while simultaneously keeping poachers and renegade trappers under control and thus protecting lawful operators from illegal competition. Complete control coverage is not possible with the present small enforcement unit and illegal operations still exist much as they did in the late autumn of 1941 when flying agents made a surprise airplane patrol of the lower Yukon River district. In three weeks, agents seized more than 3,000 unprimed muskrats, mink, and fox pelts from several traders in the area. If this trip had been made by riverboat, the only other possible transportation, the grapevine would have spread a warning in advance of the agents and the furs would have been tucked out of sight before they arrived. Fur seizures have run as high in value as $18,000 annually, however, they have diminished somewhat in recent years because of the discouraging affect of the highly efficient plane patrols upon illegal operators. Outlaw hunters can be detected from the air almost as easily as outlaw trappers.
In November of 1940, after several hours of air reconnaissance in the Mt. Hayes area, flying agents landed their plane in a clearing nearest an alien cabin and set out on snow shoes for their objective several miles further on. At the cabin, they discovered the remains of at least 21 animals – moose, caribou, and mountain sheep included. A good deal of the meat, all recently killed, had spoiled and some of it had been fed to the dogs. Needless to say, the alien got a free plane ride to Fairbanks where he was prosecuted to the limit. Agents traveling on snowshoes often required weeks to investigate a single suspect. Now, a few days plane trip will usually clear up an entire area. As an example, in 1939, in the course of a 30-day flying patrol which took them to the Alaska-Yukon border country, pilot/wardens completed seven cases, and in cooperation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, started action against several violators on the Canadian side of the line. One defendant, a flagrant poisoner, admitted using 24 bottles of strychnine in three years. In the Dawson area, a fur smuggler was caught red-handed with 84 coyote and wolf skins ready to be sneaked across from the Yukon where no bounty was in effect. Once over the line, he planned to collect Alaska bounty illegally and smuggle U.S. tobacco or other goods back into Yukon on the returning dog team.
Keeping the plane flying in 60 below zero weather is not easy. Especially designed closed cowlings prevents the cylinders from cooling below minimum operation limits but as soon as an engine is turned off, the oil must be immediately drained. If left, it will congeal within minutes to a tar-like goo. Before starting again after a stop for several hours, a canvas hood is placed over the plane’s power plant to keep the heat in and the gas burning fire pot lighted underneath. When the motor thaws, perhaps two hours later, the cylinder oil is heated over a flame until it bubbles and it is then poured into the crankcase. If the engine fails to start at once, the ritual must be repeated. Are planes worth all of this trouble? Well, in terms of areas covered, one hour by plane is worth three hard days by dog team.
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In the first years of operation, many planes were forced down. From these experiences, wardens gathered a wealth of first hand data on surviving in the cold after a forced landing. Much of this hard won information went into the Army’s distress handbook for downed flyers and many an airman owes his knowledge of how to make signals, keep from freezing, find food, and locate the nearest inhabitants to the information passed down by Alaska’s conservation agency.
They are a resourceful lot, these men. For instance, Sam White had a sudden engine failure over a swamp. Instantly selecting a favorable opening, he completed a successful forced landing, erected an emergency shelter, and set out signals to any passing planes. By and by, a fellow pilot spotted these signals, flew to the nearest town and sent a dog team to his aid. When the rescuers arrived, White helped them remove the engine and load it onto the sled, then they took it and him to town. After supervising the repairs, he returned to his plane, reinstalled the motor and flew home.
Ray Renshaw is another experienced agent and pilot who has had close calls. He was ferrying a new Monocoupe from the states when he encountered bad weather in the Yukon Territory, which blew the plane off its course and eventually forced it down because of heavy icing conditions. Luckily, a gravel bar along a river provided an emergency landing strip. It was the fall of the year and winter in the north comes early. Renshaw was not sure of his position and although the ship had a radio, it was impossible for him to direct searchers accurately. Which way to go for help was also a mystery so he decided to stay right where he was and burrow in for the long stay. Preparing a dugout in the sand, he lined it with spruce boughs then hold up in a sleeping bag. It was well that he did all this for soon the temperature dropped to 30 degrees below zero. Two weeks passed during which Renshaw eked out his emergency rations by snaring game for food. He was feeling as much at home as a snowshoe rabbit and more snow had fallen when one day he heard the faint drone of an airplane engine. In the distance, a Pan American airliner crossed the white peaked mountains and disappeared beyond the cold horizon. Immediately, Renshaw warmed up his radio and sent the exact time he saw the plane and his location in relation to its course. The transmitter was weak but a radio operator at Whitehorse caught the message and relayed it to the Juneau office of the Alaska Game Commission. Its agents contacted Pan American to ascertain the airliner's position at the precise moment the downed pilot spotted it. A search plane was dispatched immediately, found the Monocoupe and dropped a map with a note telling Renshaw where he was; only 15 miles north of a little town of Celkerk(??) The rescue plane landed in that settlement and the pilot sent a dog team up river. Meanwhile, Renshaw fire potted his engine with a wood fire and a blowtorch and despite the fact that heavy snow covered the ground and more was falling, he managed to coax his heavily iced plane into the air and flew into town, not knowing relief was already coming. The ship was so heavily encrusted with ice when it arrived, the people could not understand how it ever got there. The pilot was thin from his rigorous diet and somewhat weakened from exposure but says he could have held out until spring.
Such experiences support the Commission’s theory – that is easier and better to train woodsmen to be pilots than try to teach pilots to be first class woodsmen. All the pilots are men who have proved their medal on the ground, know the country, and have learned how to fly with the Commission. So far as possible, this policy is to be continued. Usually, of course, the Commission pilots are the rescuers rather than the rescued.
One spectacular job of this kind was undertaken in the spring of 1938 when agents spotted a 35
wreckage of a multi-engine plane among high mountain cliffs. The scene of the crash was at least eight days distance from help by dog team, if indeed a land party could scale the sheer cliffs. In a light two-place Aeronca equipped with skis, two pilots set out. When they landed, the mountain slope proved to be so steep that one pilot held full throttle to keep the ship from sliding backward over the cliff while the other jumped out and roped the airplane down. The pilot of the wrecked craft was suffering from both a broken neck and broken back and they wanted to take him out first. The Aeronca, now facing down slope was held only by a strong rope attached to the tail. At a signal the pilot at the controls blasted full power while the agent staying behind chopped the rope. Down the mountainside like a bullet, the little plane roared just off over the cliff and jumped before a threatening crash in the canyon below, gained flying speed. Within a couple of hours, it returned safety to the wreck where the adventure was repeated. There are many such cases in which the crash victims would perish in the cold, long belong land expeditions could reach them. A plane rescue spelled the difference between eventual safety and disaster.
People are not all the agents rescue. About five years ago, flying in the country west of Mount McKinley, they spotted two bull moose fighting horn to horn out on the ice in the frozen lake. Circling overhead the agents realized that the animals had locked horns. A short time later they returned to the scene with assistance and equipment, landed, and with some difficulty, roped the two moose. That done, they sawed off the interlocking antlers and saved the lives of both animals which otherwise would have died of exposure on the ice or been devoured by wolves.
In the summer months all planes operate off pontoons and in winter from skis, except in the Ketchikan area where there is open water all year round. As the freeze-up in the fall is swift and sharp, the transition time from floats to skis is usually only about five days. Hence, there is little need for regulation wheels except in those years when the freeze comes before the snow. In recent operations, two types of planes have been employed. The speedy two-place 90 hp Monocoupe and the larger three to four-place Fairchild 24. Both are easily adapted to wheels, skis, or floats. Larger types of aircraft now becoming available, presumably will be used in the future for longer hops and heavier loads. The pilots are dreaming, too, about the day when helicopters will see service as they will eliminate the snowshoe trips now necessary in rough country when the destination point lacks level ground for landing.
In this post war era, the Alaska Game Commission will expand its fleet greatly, not only are more aircraft necessary to patrol the vast wilderness adequately, but many hunters and trappers will soon be using planes themselves, introducing a whole new problem. For example, in the area around Anchorage alone, in the 1943 season, 62 small planes were used by hunting parties. More enforcement planes would be needed to keep an adequate check on such parties. So, in this respect at least, Alaska has for several years been facing a problem which will soon be common place in the state. Now that Alaska has set the pace, what are we sportsmen in the Lower 48 states going to do about providing wings for our game wardens? Frank Defense who recently wound up 24 years in Alaska, most of them with the Alaska Game Commission, thinks an airplane is about as practical a possession as a conservation agency can have, and Dufresne knows whereof he speaks. “The individual states are missing a good bet,” he says, “planes would be especially useful in the western states and such areas as the Florida Everglades or our wide coastal marshes.” Dufresne, now at United States Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, is surprised that the idea didn’t catch on long before now.
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From any viewpoint, the plane is a great asset to conservation. One plane from the air reveals the presence of hunting parties, the direction they are moving, where cars are parked and tents located. And though the warden may not always land, just the knowledge that he is watching from overhead every day or two is enough to discourage most violators.
As our states begin to adopt air patrols, we can expect two stock questions – how safe is it and isn’t it expensive? As to safety, the Alaska Game Commission points out that in all seemingly hazardous operations, not one flyer has been lost or even injured. As to expense, in 1939, one Alaska pilot flew 17,000 miles at the average cost of 3 cents a mile. It is hard to beat a record like that. In addition to law enforcement duties, planes fight fires, make the most accurate waterfowl and big game census obtainable, plant fish, control predators, do rescue work and are useful in breaking up concentrations of ducks wherever the endanger farm crops. With an airplane, administrative officials could make regular trips to all parts of their state and actually see what is going on instead of having to rely largely on annual reports, and they would only be away from the office a few short hours at a time. The idea of a plane for enforcement officers has proved its practicality in one of the toughest natural laboratories that we have.
Within a short time, flying conservation men will be common place. Will your state be among the first to have a Con-Air-vation department? It’s up to you and your fellow sportsmen to see to it that wardens get wings.
--end of article--
Evelyn: I noticed when I was reading this article, they are talking about you buying your plane, it says, “his enforcement record convinced skeptics, and in 1932, Congress was prevailed upon to pass legislation empowering the Alaska Game Commission to purchase and own operate planes. Since that time, the agents have been fairly well supplied.” Actually, even though the legislation was passed, they still wouldn’t buy you an airplane?
Sam: No. I guess the attitude of Dufresne was that “if he wants to fly so damn bad, he’ll do anything.” But that was not my attitude. What I wanted to do was enforce the laws. They wasted so much game; I just couldn’t stand to see the game wasted. Then being a figure head officer, that’s no good. You don’t feel important when you are just going around looking wise, that’s the hardest thing in the world for me to do. You got to do your job and do it conscientiously and with a dog team, you start out to go somewhere and a half dozen other people would tip off everybody that the game warden left Fairbanks with his

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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Sam White
Date of Interview: June 20, 1968.
Location of Interview: Residence of Sam White
Interviewer: Evelyn Stevens
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: Roughly 19 years.
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Law Enforcement Agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks, Alaska.
Most Important Projects: Arrested a number of people hunting illegally in Alaska.
Colleagues and Mentors: Earnest Walker, Charlie Goldstein, Johnny Schwegler, Ray Renshaw, Oscar Winchell, Clarence Rhode, Bill Taylor, Enid Thompson.
Most Important Issues: Preventing wasteful hunting of wild game
Brief Summary of Interview: At first, he goes into detail about his many jobs and positions before settling into the Fish and Wildlife service, including piloting an airplane and acting as a lumberjack, during which he got married. He then talks about his early days as a Law Enforcement Agent, along with some of his early arrests and fines, and dealing with the flawed prevailing opinions in Alaska at the time. He then talks about eventually leaving the USFWS and becoming a commercial flyer, and goes into great detail discussing his time as a flyer and the events that happened in his career. The interview is ended by reading a number of articles giving details of similar areas.
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[Note: The following is a transcription from three cassette tapes (six sides) taped in 1968. Several names and places are difficult to understand. There are undoubtedly names and places misspelled but the transcription is done to the best of my ability.] Draft #1, March 1999
Sam White
Aircraft History & Other Experiences
June 20, 1968, at the home of 77 year-old Sam White, former Law Enforcement Agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks, Alaska – left the Service in 1941, retired from flying for Wien Airlines at the age of 71. He was born in Maine, discharged from the Army in 1916, came to Alaska in 1922.
Interviewed by Evelyn (Brown) Stevens
Sam: I’ll start with 1927. Will that be all right? Or a little further back, how about 1925? We left Big Delta. We were supposed to be in Eagle to do a survey. That’s a distance of 275 miles. We packed in with six horses, me and Dan Mackenzie, an exceptionally good man. Took us all summer to go through there and from the time we left the highway at Big Delta, which wasn’t much of a highway in those days, we were eight weeks until we came out at O’Brien Creek (?) on the Fortymile. In that time, we didn’t see a living soul, including an Indian, in those eight weeks. The game was all over the country, just like the African game fields in those days; mountain sheep in their proper places, caribou by the hundreds of thousands, moose – great big ones, a lot of bears, and wolves. We came out at Eagle on the last of September and I had had a canoe shipped there. We sold our horses there in Eagle and came down the river in the canoe and we landed in Circle on the 7th day of October in a blinding snowstorm. We walked from there to Fairbanks; took us a little over a week. There were three people waiting at Circle.
There was no airplane traffic in those days. In 1925 it started a little bit but nobody ventured out much. The people waiting walked out with us and they delayed us a little bit, a man, a woman, and a banker from Texas. That banker was 70 years old! He made the trip fine too. We saw moose, caribou, wolves all the way. It was really good country then, if we could have just kept it that way. I went back to Washington, D.C. that fall. When I went to Juneau, I had made copious notes of the game population all the way through.
The Game Commission had just formed and in 1925 had very few maps on this interior country, so I turned the maps over to them and I had them marked where the horse feed and stuff like that. I went on down to the States and had a little vacation and then went on to Minnesota and later on with the Coastal Geodetic Survey (Coastal Survey). I was gone about a year. I was working with the Coastal Survey. I got a wire from the Game Commission that they would give me a job and to come on back. There were 84 people on their rolls. I would be getting more money that I was with the Coastal Survey and I wanted to come back to Alaska anyway and I had no intentions of staying outside. So I accepted the job and in March 1927, I left New Orleans and came back to 3
Juneau. I worked with old timers like ________ Goddard. Earnest Walker was the executive officer at that time, and a very good one. The assistant executive was H.W. Calhoun, another very good man. Later on, Mr. Goddard and Mr. Walker went to Washington, D.C. on another job. He did a very good job of it too. I took in about three months training there in Juneau then I came up here (Fairbanks) and guided in the Upper Tanana, Fortymile and then I went to Fort Yukon. I arrived there in December 1927. The day I got there it was 65 degrees below zero! I was hung up a week at Circle at the Tanana Road House. It was down to –65 for several days. The whole week never got above –60 so I waited until it got to –30 and I started down the trail and the next day, it was –65 again. I had three days to go but I made it all right. It was awful cold. I got to Fort Yukon and took it slow and easy. There wasn’t too much that a fellow could do. They were more or less hostile, the Game Conservation. These were the “old timers.” There were a lot of Natives there, the biggest Native village in the country, I guess. The Natives were luke warm about the whole business. The old timers at first were hostile and the Commissioner was quite hostile and the town had divided up into two fractions; the old timers and the Mission.
The Mission in general was hostile toward the game laws enforcement at that time. After I had been there for three-four months, they warmed up a little bit. They got a little more friendly. I had some very good friends there. They were a rough bunch. They were only in Fort Yukon about three months in the summer because for them to get to their trapping grounds they had to leave Fort Yukon in July-August. They only came down in May and June. Trappers from the upper territories of Canada came down there. They trapped every kind of fur in the fur line; mink, otter, weasel, wolverine, wolf, lynx, muskrat, and lots of others by the hundreds of thousands. At that time, for every dollar, you had a hundred cents, which went a long ways. In those fur years, fur was worth a lot of money. You could get $65.00 for a lynx. Some of those boys would catch 50-60 lynx at once. They had mink, marten and everything else too. They were doing well. Some of them trappers, one of them alive today, Joe _____________ was well to-do. The Mason Brothers were well to-do. W.C. Curtis was well to-do, but Bill Bryan, he never got well to-do. He drank his up. The trappers never wanted for money. They all had plenty of money to operate on. Joe ___________ was one of the most remarkable of the trappers there. He had his cabins a half-day apart. He went in in the summer to cut the wood. He had no wood to cut in the winter. He didn’t have no dog team. He supplied the cabins. He didn’t have to haul anything around so he could spend his entire time trapping. When he caught $6,000 worth of furs, he would quit. Maybe the season would run for another month but that’s all he needed to make a good living on. He had some money besides and out of that he invested some of it in stocks, principally in Canada. Most all those trappers had money in Canadian banks. Also, some of them had stock in the Canadian Pacific Railroad. They were doing pretty good. The Mason Brothers, the two of them were big husky men, they averaged $16,000 a year. That was quite a lot to make trapping at that time. The fur was awful good. I have some pictures of some of those furs.
I made a trip up to Rampart House, which was on the Canadian border then. Old Dan __________ was the trader there. He was a powerful character. He took in about a quarter of a million dollars every year in furs. A lot of the furs were exchanged for groceries and clothing and the women made a lot of the clothing themselves. They were a well-dressed bunch of Natives and they were well fed as far as a meat diet was concerned. That’s about all they were used to, with a little flour and beans. Most of the rats (muskrats) came from the Old Crow flats. That was a tremendous rat country there. Even the trappers from Fort Yukon used to go up there on the Canadian side. I was up there one time on the 8th day of May and it was 30 degrees below zero. I 4
landed on the ice with a wheel plane. Those fellows, they live tough! They didn’t have no comforts at all. They were out there in a country where there were hardly any trees; mostly marshland, and the river roamed very crooked. They had just the bare necessities of life. Most of them had no tents. They just rolled up a piece of canvas and they moved from one side or the other, whichever way the wind was blowing. Old Curtis, I remember well, he lived tougher than any of them and he didn’t have to either but he wanted it that way. His cooking kettle was a 5-gallon gasoline can and he boiled muskrats in there with the tails hanging over the pail. He would boil them one hour then he would reverse them and boil them another hour, then he would put in a cup full of flour and stir them up. Never more than a cup full and that was his feed for a whole week. I was stuck there at his place with howling dogs on the Porcupine and I came up to his place one time, it was really cold when I got there. I had a bunch of dogs too. A big blizzard came through and I was there three days. I was lying on the bunk one day looking up at the ceiling and I saw a bunch of shotgun holes in the ceiling. I said, “hey, how did that bunch of shot get up there on that loft?” He said, “oh, I shot a damn game warden there.” He was quite a joker.
I was at Fort Yukon until 1928. I got married then. I married a nurse there at the hospital. She had been there just about a year. Then they moved us from there over to Fairbanks and Dufresne was transferred to Juneau. Frank Dufresne, he was one of the agents at the time, he might have been the executive officer. He was stationed in Fairbanks then he went to Juneau. I was here in Fairbanks for quite a while. I’m still troubled with this old dog team that I had. It was kind of silly to have a dog team in a way. Most of your time, when you ought to be doing something else, was taken up taking care of those dogs, feeding them. A good part of your allotment money that you were supposed to travel on went down their throats too. They were a very inefficient mode of transportation to begin with. No matter what you were doing, at that time, it would be the only method that you could use, I guess. It was very unsatisfactory. I finally got rid of the dogs and I had that airplane. Transportation was the thing that the Game Commission needed and didn’t have. They were not going to get anywhere enforcing the laws in this country unless they took to the air. I immediately started getting into the air. I didn’t get much help either. I didn’t even know how to fly. I was totally ignorant on that. I had a little mechanical knowledge but that was about all. But I figured since somebody else could fly I could do it too. It turned out that I figured about right. I got into the air in 1929.
My first plane cost me $3,500 and it was $3,500 down the drain. It wasn’t worth a damn. It was a new one too. It was a little monoplane. You didn’t have much of a choice of airplanes in those days. I laid it down in Fairbanks. I flew it 30 hours and sold it for $500 and was lucky to be alive. It fell out from under me two-three times. I quit fooling around with that thing and I bought the Swallow bi-plane. It was a training plane but it could be modified so it would do the work. I couldn’t go Fort Yukon and back on a tank of gas. I could get over there though. It took me 1 hour and 55 minutes to go from here to Tanana on a calm day. Now you can go there in a matter of minutes, 135 miles. The Swallow turned out to be a pretty good airplane for me because you could land it short and get out short and it would perform in the snow. You could drive it around like an automobile in the snow. It steered good. If you got in tight places, that’s what you had to do, have something you could handle alone. You hardly ever had anybody with you. Whatever you did had to be done by yourself.
I remember one time I broke an oil line going to Kantishna. It was in March. I didn’t have a chance to pick a place to land, so I picked a little swamp and I got in. It was just the width of the 5
airplane and about 300 feet long. It was warm weather. I fixed the oil line and had a little spare oil. I got that all set and that night I pulled it back into the brush hoping the wind would be from the right direction. When I landed, of course, I made ski tracks and they were deep in the snow. That night it turned real warm and got foggy. About midnight it came off cold and a hailstorm come up and the wind blew. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get out of there. When I started the engine, I had to tie the tail down. The wind blew so hard. Those hailstones all rolled into those ski tracks. It was just like being on ball bearings! I took this rope that I had tied to a tree and tied it inside the cockpit and I got in there with the engine running, I revved it up then I cut that rope and then I was dragging part of that rope behind me. I made it!
Another time I was out there with Slim Avery. He was about 68 years old then. He was out there all by himself. He was always in trouble with the game laws. We were nice guys too but he just had problems with us. He raised a big garden. He had 18 dogs. I walked in on him, surprised him as I had done many times before. I asked to see his license. He didn’t have a license. I told him he had been warned several times. This time, you are going to have to pay for it. He thought if he could beat me into Diamond which was only about 100 miles away, he’d get a license. I didn’t particularly care whether he beat me or not. I took plenty of time, warmed up the airplane and took off for Diamond. He took off with his 18 dogs. I had airplane problems and landed in another swamp so he beat me there. I fixed the plane and got over there before the day was out but he had been there and gone but he had bought his license. He had to prove his license to me because I had his furs. He was really a good guy and always glad to see me and would always cook up a big feed. We’d sit down and eat and have pleasant conversation. He was always in trouble with the game laws.
He was a poker player and he would get drunk. He used to take in about $6,000-$7,000 every year. He was always going over to the old country to see his folks. I would see him in Nenana and he would be all liquored up and he would tell me what was going to happen when he got to the old country. He would walk up to the gate, open the gate, the folks would see him and they wouldn’t recognize him and the tears would run down his cheeks when he told me this. He would leave Nenana with $5,000-$6,000, plenty to go over and back and do something for the old folks which he said he was going to do. He’d get into Anchorage and get into a poker game and then he would have to wire Fowler in Nenana to send him the money to go back to Nenana! Anchorage was as far as he ever got on two or three attempts!
He is still alive, about 80 years old now. He still traps a little but not much. One winter out there he was splitting wood, and he cut his thumb off. He told me that for 12 whole days, he never slept and then he got so tired and the pain started easing up a little bit that he laid down and he slept for he doesn’t know how long. He said he went to sleep in daylight and woke up in daylight. He didn’t know if it was one day or two days, or just how long. He never had a doctor look at it because there were no doctors there. He was just stuck right there.
Evelyn: How long were you flying your own plane and having to pay your own expenses?
Sam: About 6-7 years. It costs me a lot of money. That was one of the main reasons that eventually I had to quit to recoup. I had become a proficient pilot. I had spent $15,000 in cash of my own money. I only recovered a very little of that. I sold the first airplane for $500, the next one for $1,000. Money didn’t come quick and easy in those days but it did buy quite a lot of stuff. 6
In the meantime, I had got the Game Commission in the air, against their will. They didn’t have the slightest idea the planes would be any good. I made game counts from the air and they didn’t realize it could be done that way and I couldn’t convince them. They regarded me as being prejudice to pay for the airplane, which I was, all right.
Evelyn: Did the courts support you in those days?
Sam: Half-heartedly; sometimes. I was down there in the Kantisna on a job that could have never been done any other way except by airplane. I was always having trouble with my allotment. They never gave me enough money and then they found out that I was going to do something spectacular. Benson was sitting down there at McGrath and he didn’t have no money. He wired up to me to come down there. I had an airplane under charter then. I had sold my own airplane. He wanted me to get down there just as fast as I could. I got the wire in the late afternoon and I was there early the next morning and I took a load of groceries to him. When I got there, he wasn’t there at McGrath. He was down at Stony River and left me a note to come down there, so I went on down to Stony River that afternoon. We sat down and figured out that since I was there, we might as well do something. We figured we’d go up on the Stony and look things over there. We found two guys with poison. They had 75 marten traps out in April. They had cow moose all over the place, bull moose shot all over the place. It was terrible. One of the guys had a nice 14-year old son there with him. They were driving 22 dogs and working like mad and they were all living on moose meat and beans. We told them we were going to bring them in and they wanted to leave the boy there to look after things and I said, “no you won’t leave the boy here, we’ll take him in too.” I wasn’t going to arrest him or charge him with anything but I told them he was going in. He wasn’t going to be left there alone. They had to shoot the dogs. There was no way to take care of them. We gave them so many cartridges for their guns and Benson stood in one place and I stood in another and we counted the shots as they were shooting off the dogs. They finally got the dogs all shot. He came into the cabin and he was mad. The cabin was small, the floor was sawed out and he had a long barrel, 30-40 Winchester, and he drove that thing right down into the ground in the middle of the cabin clean up on the forearm. Just the butt and the receiver stuck out of the ground. He never pulled it out. He left it right there.
We brought them into McGrath and that time, the Commissioner stood behind us. He gave them a year each in jail. The boy stayed with Benson for 6 months, and he grew like a weed when he got something to eat! Then we brought him up here and he stayed with us until his old man got out of jail. He just expanded into over 6 feet, 200-pound guy. He had the best temper and the best outlook on everything. He had no problems and he went to school. He got along good with all the other kids. I told him he could eat whenever he wanted and he was always going to that Frigidaire. He turned out to be a real good boy. He became a flyer. Last summer (1967) he was killed over at Livengood in a crash.
Evelyn: Where did you come from when you came up here?
Sam: Maine, in 1922. I came up by boat to Seward, took the train to Anchorage. I was in Anchorage two years. I came up with the Coastal Geodetic Survey. Before I came up here to Fairbanks, I was a guide and a lumberjack in Maine. Sometimes I was a scalar. Sometimes I worked with an ax and a shovel for $1.00 a day and finally, I was a scalar for $4.00 a day and eventually I was a big steam log hauler. I got $4.00 a day for that. The hauler had a payload of 7
500 tons. It was the first crawler tractor that was ever made. It was the original with roller belts over cogged wheels. It took four men to run the thing. The steersman was up front. He had from 300-500 tons coming along behind him pushing him down the hills, no brakes. No brakes were possible because such loads as that, you couldn’t brake them. I was steering it. We had an engineer, a fireman, a conductor and a steersman. It was a steam engine type vehicle with tremendous power. Its speed was 4-1/2 miles per hour. Everybody that built a crawler tractor had to pay the royalty until 1917. They had a million dollar court battle but Slumbarde won. They were five years behind him and they copied his plans. They had to pay for it.
I came up here in 1922. I had figured on coming up in 1916 but there was a war on then and I stayed home on account of that. I got into it all right. In 1919, I got out of the Army and I wasn’t in very good condition to come up right then so I had to wait a year or two. In 1922, I was right back to normal. When I went into the Army, I weighed 200 pounds, and when I came out I came out, I weighed 176. They really beat a fellow up in those days; terrible. I am 6 feet, 4 inches tall. I was like a sting bean. They trained you to be mean. Nowadays, they baby them. The way the fed us was terrible. I know, for days on end, when we were right up there and it was raining on us, with mud up to our waist, we never got out of it, day and night, week on end. You just stood there in the mud and crawled around in “no man’s land” and you never got dry for the whole week and you would go back to get something to eat and what they sent up for you was a big milk can full of boiled rice. That’s what you got; that’s what you ate. There would be bullet holes in it, there would be blood spattered on the can; there would be scalp inside the can. You had to eat it. You didn’t have nothing else to eat. Once we got warm bread, we knew whoever was packing the bread got shot and fell over on the bread and warmed it up. We found him! Other times, the cooks would take canned salmon, use a big cleaver and cut the can right down the middle and hand a half can to each man. It was already froze. I never have liked canned salmon since. I wasn’t the loser for this. I felt pretty good about being there and it was just a matter of getting back.
When I took my civil service examination, I got 5% preference for that recon job and that is probably what put me over because I was woefully shy of education. I had knowledge of certain things. I had to gather that as I went along. Then the Coastal Geodetic pulled out completely and they didn’t come back here until about 1941 on Army money.
This country was scarcely mapped at all. Just a few places. About 40% of the country had indifferent maps. The Arctic coast was nothing, just sketches. The Interior, in some places, had 200-ft. contour maps, which wasn’t accurate because there were no control points to tie these surveys to. You couldn’t go by the maps. If you went with a map, you would probably be 15-25 miles out from the place that you were going to because there was that much error. Chandalar Lake in the Arctic was a good example. You had 35 miles out east and west on the map and 15 miles out north and south. When I was flying with Air Force Geodetics, during the war, that work had to be done in the wintertime in the night because they had to have the stars. They made up their star list in Bettles. I said, “that won’t do, where did you take the position from?” “The map” they said. I said, “you’ll be out 25 miles, you won’t get one of those stars.”
((end of Side A, Tape #1))
(start of Side B, Tape #1)
Well, the first night at Chandalar Lake, it was pretty grim there, no trees, no brush, no nothing, just 8
moss and snow. We were there in March. The first night was a beautiful night, rare for that country and there wasn’t one star that came into the instruments. I told them, I’ll give you an assumed position, you make up the star list from that. They hesitated but they had to do something so they made up the star list from that and the stars rolled right in on the minute so that worked out. After that they always got an assumed position on any places in doubt. Then they had these great big bunches of pictures taken from 20,000 feet by the Air Force. They were what they were trying to tie together with the controls. They had to have the controls to put them together or the pictures wouldn’t have been any good. We went all over the country by these pictures.
These pictures were so secret that they didn’t have a name on them. They had a number, but they wouldn’t let the number list go out of Washington, D.C. and nobody could memorize them. Each picture had a number on them and the only way you could tell where it was, was to have seen it and remembered it. I had a good many arguments with them. Finally, it wound up after a good many mistakes, they let me do just what I wanted to do. I would take a look at the picture and I’d tell them that that lake or that bend in the river or that island is over on such and such a place and we’ll go there.
Evelyn: Was this in the 40’s?
Sam: This was in the 40’s, during the war. There was a crash program to map Alaska because the pilots they sent up here were trained to navigate by radio aides and they didn’t have the radio aides in. When the pilots had to go from here to someplace, it was right along a river like Chicken, or Northway. Some of them would wind up over behind the Alaska Range at Gulkana on the Copper River and we’d have to hunt for them. You couldn’t blame them; they weren’t use to this drainage flying like we had to do. Our method of flying and navigation was we used a compass when we had to, and we finally got wise on how to use it. We’d fixed the major drainages in our minds then we’d fix in our minds what drained into the major drainages. If we wanted to go from here to Alatna, all the tributaries, all these rivers, we would just cut them at certain angles and that would take you right straight to the place you wanted to go. If you kept the angles right, crossing the creeks and valleys you couldn’t miss. You had to get a landmark and your first time over you would probably miss a little bit but the next time over you would have landmarks. After you had been over two-three times, you would have your land marks down pat and you could go right straight to any place in Alaska by just cutting the drainages at the right angle. You could fly straight. It wasn’t a system of following rivers or anything like that so much as it was cutting creeks and rivers at certain angles and getting that angle pretty correct.
Evelyn: You said that you finally had to sell the Swallow and you were chartering airplanes. By that time, were you getting funds or an allotment in order to cover things like this?
Sam: No, I wasn’t. I was getting an allotment which was pitifully small. Sometimes, it amounted to $2,500 for a whole year and everything had to come out of it except my salary. I’ll tell you I got a good many letters lecturing me for exceeding my allotments. One time I went down to help out Benson. I figured he had the money because he wired for me to come and I had this airplane on a charter – only paid for it when we were using it which was a good deal for the Game Commission, although they didn’t look at it that way. Anyway, I go down there and we got so immersed in this work. We picked up fellows on the Stony River and then we picked up two guys 9
up on the Tonsona, all trapping in April. They were trapping marten, which were no good, they looked like dishrags. We picked up a whole bunch of fellows and they got some penalties too. That old Commissioner was sure glad to see us clean things up. Even old Hightower came into the office and he said, “you fellows mean business, and by gosh, we’re going to be with you from now on.” When we got this work done, we got into the office and sat down to figure up the bills. We had obligated the Commission for about $1,500. We had done the work as cheap as we could. I asked Benson how much money he had in his allotment. “Me? I don’t have any money in my allotment.” I said, “you ordered the plane!” He said, “well, I was figuring on your allotment!” I told him “my allotment is gone.” We looked at each other and I said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll make up a report from the work that we have done and we’ll send in the bills and then we’ll figure out the finances and send them in later. There isn’t much they can say in light of what we’ve done but they’ll know what our scheme is. They are not silly by any means. They’ll know from the violation reports just why we sent them in first. They’ll be wise to it but there really isn’t much they can say.” We got a mild rebuke. You could tell by reading this mild rebuke that there was some pretty heavy feeling behind it. They wanted the work done, but when they were down at the office, they never seemed to realize what was going on up here in this country.
Evelyn: That was in Juneau?
Sam: Yes.
Evelyn: Who was the Executive?
Sam: Tihume(?) for a while. He was the best executive officer. He stood behind his men real solid. Dufresne was more of a field man than he was an executive officer. At the time of the Stony River job, he was the executive officer and I had irritated him a good many times by exceeding my allotment and doing things without properly notifying the office. In fact, I’d have it all done before they knew I was doing anything. We had telegraph. You couldn’t blame Dufresne for taking issue with this because he had been a field man too and a good one.
Evelyn: Can you remember the year that they finally decided to go ahead and give you funds and believe and realize what the aircraft could do for them?
Sam: That was kind of thrust upon them. When I went out with my own airplane I created much havoc with the trappers, fur buyers, and principally the alien population. There were aliens in the creeks, on the Yukon valley and all over the country that the Game Commissioner had never heard of. My first assignment was to clean up on those aliens and I cleaned up on them. Dufresne knew some of them. They didn’t have licenses. Even government officials were helping them dispose of their furs surreptitiously and making a little profit for themselves by doing that. I got those aliens so scared that after a while, they were making special trips into Fairbanks to get citizenship papers and some of them to get a license. I brought them in, one after another. They didn’t get much sympathy and they were hostile to the United States Government. They were mostly communistically orientated and they didn’t know no more than communism.
I was on the Yukon one time. There were three Finns over there. That was when the Russian-Finnish war was going on. Grant Collins and I went down the Yukon on a big patrol with a boat. When we left here, the water was real high, the ice had just gone out of the Yukon and 10
there were miles and miles we couldn’t get ashore because the ice was piled up higher than this house here along both banks. The river was flooding and the desire was to get into the Novi (local name for the Nowitna River) before any of the trappers came out of there. We wanted to bottle all of them up. On the way down, we contacted this alien who had sold some furs and I knew about it but I couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t have any proof. We took his gun away from him. He had three illegal bear traps and we sunk them in the river. We got a release from him and dropped them in the Yukon and then we went down to the Novi. We got into the mouth of the Novi before any of them had come out so we were intercepting them every day going up the Novi. We were doing them favors and we were doing them disfavors too. We stopped every boat and searched it from stem to stern. They had ducks and geese but we paid no attention to them because they were eating them. We would let them have a little coffee. They were drifting. They were all out of gasoline. We gave them a gallon of gasoline to cross the Yukon, otherwise they might not hit Kockrines. They might be swept past depending on the wind. If they had any babies in their group, we would give them a can of milk for each baby. If anybody was out of coffee or tea, we would give them some.
The first night we spent outside of the boat for four days and nights was on the Novi. There was a cabin with a roof. It was fairly good. There must have been a million field mice on top of it. We moved right in with them! We stayed there. From that cabin, we let the boats come down, then we would hail them in. I’d stand up there with a whistle and when they would go by the cabin, I’d whistle at them and they would break their necks to get in there. They figured that we would be after them if they didn’t. So they would come in and we got one bolt but we didn’t get any contraband. We grabbed their guns that they shot them with. We were skating pretty thin there but we did it and got away with it.
You know an enforcement officer can get away with a lot of stuff if he just goes at it right. You don’t want to look weak, you want to put on a big face. We picked up all the contraband they had and then the last man to come down was John Lassion – a great big tall Swede. Here we had been over a week with no meat to eat. We had given a lot of our stuff away and we were getting down pretty low. Here came John Lassion floating down the river. He was out of gas too. We hailed him in. He was explaining by the time he hit the bank why he had to do all this stuff. He had a half of moose in his boat lying on a bed of grass, fresh killed. Flies were all over it. He was eating off one end and he had three dogs, and they were eating off the other end. He actually had to kill that moose because he didn’t have any other grub except he had 4-5 geese. He had them all rolled up in packages and one of them was for Mrs. DuPhane, the Trader’s wife down in Ruby. He had others but he wasn’t eating them, he was eating the moose. He was starving. He was eating the meat but he needed something else. He’d been that way for 2-3 weeks. We had a tent pitched there on the bend of the river where we could look each way. We cooked up a big feed, applesauce, and everything we had and we fed him up three times within three hours. We fed him about every hour before he decided he had better go. When Glenn was searching the boat, I sat on the bank and Glenn pulled out a package from under the seat and said, “here’s a goose.” I said, “grab the goose.” John said, “that’s for Mrs. DuPhane down in Ruby.” I said, “well, that’s too bad, Mrs. DuPhane doesn’t mean nothing to me.” We grabbed that goose and let the others go by. We ate that goose!
That’s the only time I ever done anything like that. I felt like we were justified, we hadn’t eaten any meat in a week. We were just like old John, he was so hungry for hotcakes and bacon and 11
applesauce, that he was frantic. He ate like a pig! He had it running down his chin. He grabbed all his guns and got the leases signed for every one of them. Even the traders down in Ruby said, “well, if you are going to enforce the law, we would rather see you do it like that than half-heartedly.” That was the attitude. If they had got wise to that situation down in Juneau, they could have had this country tied up tight. It was such a fight that they figured that it was almost impossible to do. All you had to do was get in there and carry a bold face and if you brought a fellow in, which I often did, and then turn him loose, don’t let that get you down, just grab him again and bring him back. He would get discouraged before you would. It was a tough game.
Evelyn: Do you think these people felt that the game was going to always be here and it didn’t need to be protected?
Sam: Yes, there was so much of it. They figured it didn’t need protection. In fact, one of the federal judges told me right on the corner of the bank, he said, “I don’t approve of you arresting these old-timers for shooting a moose in the summer time.” I said, “no, I know you don’t.” He said, “the game was here for the people when the country was opened up. Now the country is opened up, and you should let them have it anytime they want it.” I said, “what are future generations going to do?” He said, “they won’t need game.” That was a federal judge’s attitude! There were a lot of them the same way.
Evelyn: I think they are gradually awakening but it may be too late!
Sam: From the White Mountains on the Beaver to the Crazy (?) Cliffs at Eagle, there is 300 miles of sheep range. Now, there is a batch of sheep probably, 20 to 40. The next bunch occurs up at South Fork of Windy Springs, 75 miles by airline. From there on to the head of the Salcha where the high peaks are doing the splits, that’s the next point, then on the Charley River is the next bunch. That’s the biggest bunch. Then from there, no more sheep until you get to the Crazy Cliffs. The State Game Commission was allowing them to shoot in the White Mountains down there on the Beaver. There used to be sheep on the Twelvemile Summit in my memory and on the Eagle Summit. Nothing there for years now.
Evelyn: Do you think it is because the population has moved in or that it has been over hunted?
Sam: Over hunted without restrictions or proper restrictions. I can remember when I used to be invited to go over to Nome Creek to get mountain sheep. That was just back of Twelvemile Summit. They would get mountain sheep every time they went over there. The mountain sheep had already disappeared off the Twelvemile Summit. I didn’t go with them because I figured I had facilities to go more places where the sheep weren’t hurt. In those days, we didn’t have a real good meat market. Sometimes we would be out of this and that and sometimes, be out of everything. We nearly had to lay up a supply of moose meat or mountain sheep or caribou or something. About every other year, I would get a moose and the next time I wanted game meat, I would get sheep. I would get caribou sometimes, but after you eat that for a while, you don’t want it anymore. You can get a real good caribou by picking one of those big old white-necked bulls, the bigger and whiter the neck the better but be sure he is fat, just rolling in fat. You could tell when you see them. Get them before the 5th of September then you are plenty safe for good meat. The cows and the calves are no good. 12
Evelyn: I got pretty full of moose meat. I’ve been in Anchorage for 22 years. For all the years that my children were growing up, money was tight, I had to go shoot my moose and my husband would get his and I got kind of tired of moose and caribou. I never got a good caribou. My husband would say, “that’s your animal, shoot it!”
Sam: You are bound to get some animals that are not up to par. I was in a country where there were plenty of them. I would watch the moose that came and went in that locality and would pick out the best one and be sure to get them before the 10th or 12th of September. I would pick a big fat bull, the fatter, the better, not a young one. The young ones run around so much that they are tough. They don’t put on much fat and their meat is tough. We never shot cows in those days. If you can get the moose just before the rut when he stops eating and starts running around and the fat starts leaving him, then he’ll be good. When they get into the rut, they get tough and the dogs won’t even eat them. You can smell caribou when they are in the rut, even dogs turn up their noses at that time of year.
Evelyn: With your aircraft, were you on wheels or skis most of the time?
Sam: I was on wheels, skis, and floats, but when I was working for the Game Commission, it was wheels and skis, about evenly divided. I could get into just about any place that I wanted. Later on, I found out that I could drive a herd of caribou over snowdrifts that I couldn’t land on. They would chop the drifts up with their hoofs and I would land behind them. I found that out accidentally. Then one time after I started commercial flying, I got caught in a whiteout. I had soldiers with me and I was in the hills and it looked like there was going to be a crash for sure and a bad one. You couldn’t see anything and all of a sudden I saw a blur ahead of me and by golly, it was a band of caribou and I went in and landed right amongst them. They got out of the way. We had caribou going out from under both wings and I expected to hit one of them but the situation was so serious that I didn’t care if I did hit one of them. It would wreck the plane but it wouldn’t hurt us. If we hadn’t found them, I don’t think we would have lived more than two minutes after that. I was flying a Blanca CH-400. This was in 1943. I was commercial flying, geodetics, nailing the stars down to the earth.
Evelyn: How long did you have to charter? You mentioned you had to charter aircraft.
Sam: About three years. This particular one, I made the contract myself because I knew they would never make it in Juneau. I had the power to make contracts. They didn’t like to do it. I went ahead and made them before they knew about it and I used the plane on one trip and got some results. In fact, I always got results on a patrol airplane. We picked up this Stromberger at Dry Creek, that is only 80 miles out of Fairbanks. That guy had been out there since 1922 and he supplied the market with mountain sheep meat. I knew where he was and I knew what he was doing. I tried to get Noel Wien to take me out there once or twice in his airplane and then something would come up and he would have to take somebody else somewhere else on an emergency. I was getting nowhere.
I knew about that guy ten years before I ever went out there and picked him up. He had all that time to just slaughter the game. Wayne House was here with me and I didn’t mention to anybody that I was going out there. I had this aircraft under charter and Wayne was here and I asked him if 13
he would go out there with me. He was eager to go. I told him to say nothing to nobody and get ready and go. We made our plans and we had to land 18 miles beyond his place. We couldn’t land right at his place cause he would have been alerted. We flew high over and took a look as we went over and we landed in a swamp on Portage Creek in the deep snow. We pitched a tent, and tied the plane down. The next morning we walked over, 18 miles on snowshoes. That was nothing, we did that all the time. We got down in this valley that he was in on Dry Creek and walked down to his cabin.
The dogs started barking and he came out and saw us coming about 100 yards away. He hadn’t seen anyone for three months. He was always alone; sometimes it would be six months and not see anyone. He came out with his hand way out in front of him and I said, “Hugo, this is Mr. House here, an agent. We are here on business and we mean business and we are going to treat you right and we are going to look you over and if you are clean, o.k. and if you ain’t, you are going to have to take the rap. I want to look at that sled.” The sled was in the yard and it had a load on it, canvas covered, and his dog harnesses were all strung out. He had just unhooked the dogs. He went over to his sled and said, “that’s my sled and you can’t look at it.” I walked over to him and I said, “Hugo, we’re here on business and we’re going to do business. I’m the boss while I am here and you are going to do what I say or else you are going to be in big trouble. I’m going to look at that sled whether you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I told him to stand at one side and he said, “yessir, and saluted me.” From then on, he was a model guy because he had been in the Prussian Army a few years back and he had that drilled right into him, the respect for constitutional authority.
I searched his sled and we found violations on it. We found more on the roof, around under the snow. The first pileup was 2 cow moose which was illegal and we found 15 mountain sheep around in the snow and on top of the roof. That night, we were in the cabin making up our notes talking with Hugo, and Wayne said he hadn’t fed his dogs. I said, “he’s feeding them mountain sheep.” I told Hugo to go ahead and feed his dogs, it’s not going to make any difference. You are in a bind anyway so go ahead and feed your dogs. He went out and cut up a big fat ram and fed it to the dogs. The next day we went up to his other place. Wayne went down to another place he had and found some more stuff and I went up to the upper cabin. The next day, Wayne came up and we got a shovel and dug around in the snow and we found 51 mountain sheep heads, some were ewes, some lambs. We found three set-guns that he used to put over his cabin. He said they were for bears but they would get a man just the same. You would never notice the guns. You would walk up to the door and open the door and you would get it. We took them. I told him to take his dog team and haul over a load of contraband over to the tent for us and leave it there. I saved up enough other stuff to be sure to have him in case he done away with that. He didn’t. He took it and left it just as we asked him. Then he went on into Birch Lake to have his dogs taken care of by a friend. I told him to make the arrangements to last a long time because he wasn’t coming back here for quite awhile. He got six months and $150 fine. He had asthma. He couldn’t live in the river valleys. In the summers he went up in the mountains to the upper cabin. There was a ridge above his cabin and the mountain sheep would come down there and post a sentinel and there were caves that they had dug in there. There was some kind of mineral in there that they craved. Hugo had a blind there and you could shovel up cartridge cases by the shovel full, he had done so much shooting from that blind. The mountain sheep would come down over that ridge and disappear right in those caves. It was so depressing, like a morgue. I knew Hugo long before that. He was very arrogant, very aggressive. Every time he would come 14
into my office, he would come in with a chip on his shoulder. He went back out there then he got sick and came in here and died which I didn’t moan too much because he would be out there doing it again.
He was a part of a ring that was furnishing sheep meat on the market here in Fairbanks and it had to be cleaned up from that end. He had a man at Midway on the Big Delta and he had a lookout down on the highway. His name was Tony Caugin. When we were frisking Hugo’s cabin, Wayne found a postcard and it was from Tony Caugin. Tony was somewhat illiterate but he could scratch his name and on this postcard it said “eber thng is alrite on de riber” and that meant that he could bring down another load of sheep meat. After the whole thing was over, everybody was concerned about that ring and Tony. We went out to see him and he invited us to have some moose stew with him and we sat at his table and had moose stew. When we finished, I took the postcard out of my pocket and held it up and pointed it right toward Tony. For a little while, he didn’t notice and then all of a sudden he got his eye on it and yelled, “anybody that said I wrote that card is a damn liar!” I said, “Tony, nobody said you wrote that card but I think you did. When I get into Fairbanks, I have hundreds of your signatures on trapper’s licenses. All I have to do is compare it with the signatures on the licenses and I can tell if you signed it or not.” Well, he said, “I guess I did write it alright.” He didn’t contest it but he sure had a funny reaction to it.
Evelyn: How much of an area were you trying to cover?
Sam: I went from here to Unalakleet, to Kotzebue, to north of the Yukon, to the Kuskokwim.
Evelyn: Did you have the same large area prior to your aircraft?
Sam: No. Literally, there was no specified boundaries. We could work anywhere in the country. I had the Yukon, the Tanana valleys and the Kantishna and the tributaries.
Evelyn: When you first started your aircraft, what did you do, haul your own gas?
Sam: Yes, I made gas caches. I shipped gas out by boat to certain places like Rampart, Dolby on the Koyukuk and remote places. I could get gas in Ruby, Tanana, most of the time, Manley Hot Springs and places like that. Sometimes they would be out and sometimes I wound up short.
Evelyn: What was the year when they finally said, “o.k. you’re right, we’re going to buy you an airplane.”
Sam: They didn’t say it that way. I gave up the aircraft business. I had taken too much of a beating. I had an inkling in the back of my mind that maybe I could precipitate the situation. I wasn’t altogether innocent of that. As furriers came along during the beaver season down the Yukon, the Koyukuk and all over, it took me all summer to seal the beaver on the Yukon and the Koyukuk by the old method of travelling. With the airplane, I could go down and seal them all in less than a week and be back in Fairbanks in the office. It was so ridiculous to do it any other way.
They decided that I was spending too much money buying gas for the airplane. I didn’t have much money in the allotment left at that time of the year so I thought I would just do it the way I wanted to do it. 15
I told them I needed an outboard motor. They sent me three outboard motors. They had all been used. Charlie Goldstein and Johnny Schwegler was up here buying fur like mad and they were travelling by airplane. I started out from Fairbanks to go down as far as Holy Cross to seal the beaver and up to Koyukuk which meant that I would be gone all summer long. Charlie and Johnny went down the Yukon three times to buy beaver and they couldn’t buy them because I hadn’t been there to seal them. You could imagine how they felt and I knew how they felt. That is one reason that I did it. When I got to Tanana, I was on my third motor and it was just falling apart so I couldn’t go no further. I never got to seal a beaver on the trip. I just caught an airplane and came back to Fairbanks.
Johnny and Charlie went into the Game Commission office and they just raised particular hell and told them what they thought of them. They really made a scene – you send a man out with broken down outboard motors. They were traveling by airplane and everybody else traveled by airplane. If I had had an airplane they could have bought their beaver skins the first trip down the river and made a good profit. As it was, they probably bought the beaver skins anyway on the last trip or later on when they did get sealed by other wardens happening along. There would be no profit because they had eaten up all the profit traveling. That was what precipitated buying the first airplane. I maybe shouldn’t be talking this way but that was the truth! That’s the way it happened.
Evelyn: Who at that time was the Executive?
Sam: Dufresne.
Evelyn: Then what type of airplane did they get for you?
Sam: They got me a Monocoupe. It was a hot little thing but it was all right. It was a two-place airplane. They wanted to buy me a Cub. They could get two Cubs for the price of a Monocoupe but I wouldn’t go for a Cub.
Evelyn: Was the Monocoupe low wing?
Sam: No, it was a high-wing monoplane. It had a 90 hp Lambert engine. It was a pretty good engine and it was a wonderful airplane for a two-place plane. It was built strong and very well. The Cubs were fragile and not too reliable. I just went everywhere with that Monocoupe like I did the Swallow but when you flew the Monocoupe, you had to handle it all the time. Even when you had it on the ground you had to stay right with it until you came to a complete stop.
Evelyn: How many years had you been flying?
Sam: When I quit flying, I had been flying 33 years. I had in the neighborhood of 14,000 hours.
Evelyn: So at that time, you had been flying 5-6 years when you got the Monocoupe?
Sam: Seven-eight years, I guess. We got the Monocoupe in about 1938. Shortly afterwards, they got the Fairchild 24. They were beginning to listen to me a little. The results had been 16
coming in. They must have created an impression because it was so different than anything they had ever done before. It was enhancing the prestige of the Commission and taking them places they had never been and rooting out all these aliens out in the river valleys. They must have noticed that eventually. They never told me they did. That guy we took the 21 guns from down the Yukon, I gave him a warning right then to never let me catch him with anything again and the next February after that I went down and checked up on him. He was out trapping. He had $1,500 worth of furs. I stayed with him overnight, ate breakfast with him, then took his whole winter’s catch
((end of Side B, Tape #1))
--start of Side A, Tape #2--
and put him in jail. The courts stood behind me.
Evelyn: When did you leave the Service?
Sam: September 1941. I never went back. When I leave a place, I’m through with it. Two months later, I was offered $800 more a year to come back. My reaction was that if I was worth $800 more a year to them, I should have had it before I left. I was getting a lot more than that in commercial flying. I was flying for Wien, who were very good friends of mine and I was covering the country and I didn’t have to get shot at either. I never did really get shot at but I had a gun pulled on me two-three times. One time by a woman but I faced her down and she threw the gun into the brush, turned around and went into the cabin and banged the door. I wasn’t after her; I was after her husband. He wasn’t there. He come in later to make an issue out of it and I shut him up quick.
Another time a gun was pulled on me was when I went over to Lake Menchona in March with a dog team. The snow was very deep. Another agent started out from Anchorage. The going was pretty tough for him so he quit at Lake Menchona and came back to Nenana. That is where I ran into a hornet’s nest. I started checking up around the Lake and everybody had more moose than they were supposed to have and they were feeding it to the dogs. There was one old guy there, an old Finn. I found 21 moose heads around his cabin. Eight to ten dogs could eat up a lot meat in the winter. I dug in the snow and dug them up. Most of them were cows.
He was out at his spike camp on the Muddy River so I went out there and the trail was deep in the snow. I was on skis, between the dogs and the sled. I didn’t have a gun but when I got near his cabin, he had a 30-06 Winchester, 94 model, leaning up against the wall outside the door. When the dogs barked, he came out and looked up and down the creek and then he looked at me and then he grabbed the gun. I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there. He pumped all the cartridges out into the snow and never fired a shot and leaned the gun up against the cabin and went back in the cabin and slammed the door. I went on over. I had to cross a creek. The banks were high and I got up to the door and knocked on the door and he bellowed, “come in.” I was a bit leery to go in but I did. He had a calf moose killed that morning lying on the floor. I said, “where’s the old cow?” He said, “oh, she’s just out back of the cabin.” He had killed the cow too.
When I come back in, there were five dog teams ahead of me breaking trail. We brewed tea and coffee along the trail. We got into Nenana and they all got a month each, and $150 fine. They 17
gave more sentences back in those days. Did you ever hear of Old Mrs. Hyde, the Commissioner? She was a wonderful old lady. She didn’t make much money and what money she made, she put into mining claims. She said she had a good day, she’d made some money.
When I brought those fellows in, there was a fellow by the name of Nolan. I went down to the pool hall that night and of course, in Nenana, that was all they were talking about right then. That was a big thing there. Five guys went to jail in one day. Old Nolan was playing a game of pool. He said, “I’d like to know what that old hen would do to me if she ever got me up there.” Everyone heard him say it and everyone laughed. A year later, I had him. He did go afoul of the law. I had forgotten all about what he had said earlier. I took him in to Mrs. Hyde’s court. She read the warrant to him and she said, “what do you plea?” He said, “oh, I done it all, I deserve the max. She took her glasses off and said, “now you are going to find out what the old hen is going to do to you!” I just about fell through the floor! Nolan thought that I had told her but I never had because I never thought of it in between times. Somebody had told her, all right.
Evelyn: Who was the Executive when you left?
Sam: Dufresne. He passed away. I knew him from 1925 on. He made more money writing than he did on salary. He was quite a writer. He wrote several books and he wrote for Outdoor Magazine. He was assistant editor for Field and Stream after he left the Commission. He wrote stories for them long before he left the Commission. He was a very successful man. He had the first chance and the best chance to buy airplanes. We needed this transportation and I had broke my neck to convince him that that was what we had to have. They allotted $30,000 to the Game Commission to buy transportation vehicles. With all the stuff that I had proven, so what does he buy? He buys three motor boats, $10,000 each! He could have bought a Stinson, Jr., a first class airplane then for $7,500. The hitch was the boat yards were having a hard time during the depression and Coolidge was a boat builder in Seattle and he needed a contract. So he built three boats. They called them “fox boats.” One of them went over on the Kuskokwim, got there just in time to get froze in and pulled up on the bank and never taken off the bank. One of them got here and people took it from here and went down the Yukon about as far as Ruby, went back up to Fort Yukon, put in on the bank and there she laid and rotted forever. It was never put back in the water. It never got to its destination. They would run the engine full blast and all it would do was plow water. There was no speed to them and you couldn’t go nowhere. They drew lots of water and always running up on gravel bars. I never got in any of them. If I had, I’d been so mad that I’d probably quit right then!
Evelyn: I guess things haven’t changed too much, Sam. Did you ever have any minor accidents?
Sam: Yes. My first crack-up was in June 1935, down the river sealing beaver. Fortunately, I had them all sealed and they wanted me to come down to Kaltag. I went down to Kaltag and landed on that bar and the wind had drifted the silt over it. There was nobody there to tell me that it was dangerous and I flipped over on my back. I wrecked that airplane but it was rebuilt. It was the Stinson, Jr. on contract. Then I knocked the landing gear off of a Blanca up at Point Hope. That involved some bureaucracy too. That was on my own, not with a government agency. That model Blanca had a very poor landing gear. It would never hold up. Wien had them and they knocked them off just as fast as they could. There was another gear that was capable of being 18
installed on that model but it was from another model of Blanca. It was a Goodyear but the CA would not approve of it because it was not made for that model. It had not been engineered for that model airplane although they were practically identical. They would not license it for that plane so I had to put on the old one. It didn’t last long. I finally got it back here at great expense and I put the other gear on and never said a word to them. It worked and I never knocked that gear off again. That bureaucracy is something else, just unwieldy. The folks that are running it, they can’t do nothing about it so the only thing to do was to stick your neck out and keep your fingers crossed. That’s the plane that I was using when I was in the whiteout.
In 1940, we got two Fairchilds in Hagerstown. Ray Renshaw and Glenn ________ were flying by that time. They had a meeting in Anchorage and I was down there putting that Monocoupe together and I attended the meeting. At the end of the meeting, Dufresne asked for some ideas from each one of the agents that might help the Commission. He saved me to the last and I thought he was going to pass me up. When he called on me, I proposed that they take two or three of the agents that were capable and wanted to fly and give them some training at Game Commission expense and buy airplanes for them, just like they bought dog teams and boats. It wouldn’t cost no more in the end and the results would be much greater. With the exception of two young fellows who wanted to fly, there was absolute stunned silence for about two minutes. Then Dufresne said, “well, that was a dilly.” The two fellows that wanted to fly applauded immediately and it created kind of an embarrassing situation.
Evelyn: How can you remember this far back and all the details? I can’t remember things from day to day or that far back. I have to write notes to myself.
Sam: You know some people, when they get old, they can’t remember things that happen immediately but they can remember things back 30-40 years ago. Did you ever notice that?
Here are my notes on the Stromberger case – pleaded guilty, five counts, sentenced to six months, fined $150.00. That case didn’t make much of an impression on people until I got to the set-guns. Then you should have seen the people stiffen up when I laid out the set-guns and told the story.
Evelyn: At these court hearings, did you have a lot of people coming in?
Sam: On a case like that, there would be quite a few. It was only a hearing; not a trial and he plead guilty. There were quite a number of people in there. The other evidence didn’t make much of an impression but the set-guns did. You could see the change right then. From then on they were dead set against him. It took something drastic like that to endanger human life to change them over.
Evelyn: O.K., you said you got a Fairchild 24 in 1940?
Sam: Yes, the factory was to let us know when they would be ready for acceptance and Ray Renshaw and I were going back to pick them up. His was a ranger-powered model and the one I was to pick up was a warner-powered model. We went back there and they didn’t have them finished. They had barely started on the one I was to pick up. I was kind of glad they didn’t have my far along because there were some things I wanted put on it and it was easier to put the things on as they built it rather than add later. I outlined what I wanted to one of the superintendents 19
there and he said, “I’ll tell you mister that you will never get this stuff put on from this factory because we got a tough inspector right here in this factory and he won’t let you get away with nothing.” I said, “alright, where is this inspector. I want to talk with him.” I didn’t get the chance to see him. He happened to be out right then. They took the things that I wrote down and explained to him and made little drawings of them and they asked him about it when he returned. I wasn’t there but he said, “well, go ahead and put the stuff on for him. I don’t know what he wants up there. I’ve never been to Alaska.” When I returned, they were almost taking off their hats to me. He was a pretty reasonable inspector after all! One of the things that I wanted was just a simple parker valve put on the bottom of the oil tank so I could drain the oil in the wintertime. If you put in on the end of a drain like most of them did, hanging down below the tank, then the thing froze up. If you could put the valve right up near the tank then it stayed thawed out. You could drain the oil immediately.
We came across the country together to Seattle. He came up the Inside Passage and I came up through Canada. There was no highway then. From horizon to horizon, you wouldn’t see anything but timber and mountains. Gasoline at Fort Nelson was $2.75 a gallon. I had to have 60 gallons. I came up later in an airplane of my own and I had to pay $2.75 again only this time I needed 120 gallons. Gasoline here in Fairbanks usually ran around 50 cents. I paid $2.00 a gallon at Wiseman frequently. I filled my tanks right up and I would come back here and I would have maybe a half tank.
You know Oscar Winchell? He was a famous flyer up here. I was in McGrath one year and he was station manager for the Consolidated at that time and he was doing some flying too but mostly he was a real sharp station manager. There was a fellow came through from Bethel and he was flying a Voyager. He had two 12-year old kids with him, a boy and a girl. It was in the winter, about March. Oscar and I happened to be near the gas pit when he was gassing up. He had a little pad of paper and he had been figuring on it and he said, “I need just so many gallons and don’t put in any more. I don’t want it full.” I said, “you’re going from here to Anchorage and the weather is spotted and I know how much gas you need.” So Oscar chimed in and he told him that he had better fill it up. He said, “mister, I was flying B-29’s during the war and I know what I am doing.” Well, he took off to Anchorage and when he was down on the runway, revving up, we debated about going down and having one more try at it. He didn’t make it to Anchorage. He went down in a lake and had no emergency rations. They were fortunate enough to be near a trapper’s cabin there on the lake. He didn’t know where he was with two children with him. Fortunately, the weather wasn’t too cold. That was the answer we would get when we would try and give new pilots advice. They thought that since they had flown Thunderbolts, B-25’s, and B-29’s or something during the war, they knew what they were doing. Consequently, we got out of the habit of offering advice to them even when we would see them doing wrong. It was a week before they were found. They were pretty hungry when they were located. This was in the late 40’s. He was on wheels, which makes for a tough lake landing.
Evelyn: How did you handle your maintenance all through this period of time when you were doing this on your own?
Sam: When I was doing it on my own, I had local maintenance men around at terrific expense. I had to have good maintenance and it developed into almost a proposition where you were just swapping dollars. Before that I use to make pretty good money but along the last, it was just 20
pretty much swapping dollars. You couldn’t get enough for your aircraft per hour to take care of the maintenance.
Evelyn: After the Service started purchasing aircraft, did they have a hangar type thing set up for maintenance.
Sam: When I left the Game Commission, they just blossomed right out into a full-blown aviation program. Which led me to believe they were just waiting for me to get out of the way. They got a lot of surplus airplanes. After that, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t last long on the Game Commission on planes. We got the Monocoupe in 1939 and in 1940, the Fairchild, and in 1941 I was through. I didn’t reap much of the fruit for that victory.
Evelyn: Could the beginning of the War have had anything to do with that expansion in any way?
Sam: No. It didn’t have. They had a live wire in there who could fly by that time – Clarence Rhode. He was a pusher and he liked to fly. He was good at it. I knew Clarence well. We made a lot of trips together.
Evelyn: You were no longer working with the Bureau when Clarence came?
Sam: Oh, yes. He worked with me quite a while. When he first came up here he wound up at Eagle. He come down the river. He couldn’t fly yet and then we worked together. He got on with the Forest Service first then finally with the Game Commission. We made several trips together. One of them was the International Boundary Patrol where we rounded up quite a number of people. We worked with the Canadian Mounted Police and then I soloed the man, gave him his instructions. He had some other flying time but I don’t think he had soloed. It didn’t cost him for instructions for I instructed him and soloed him and arranged for his private license. It must have been in 1940 because that fall I was through. He wanted to fly awful bad so I gave him his chance. It would have cost him a lot of money to get all that instruction. He just didn’t have it, he had a family.
Evelyn: I’ve been under the impression that basically he is the one who pushed so hard to force this continued growing.
Sam: Yes. You are right. I didn’t see much of that because when I got out I lost track. I got so busy. I started flying for Wien immediately. I flew for him for four years and then I quit them and went on my own for quite a while. I can’t remember how many years. Then I got so damn tired of flying that I came home and I sat down in that chair and I said, “I’m not going to get out of this chair for the whole winter.” I hadn’t been idle for more than two weeks and Wien’s man came up and said, “we want you to go flying for us again.” He said, “we have people who can take them out but they don’t bring them back all the time and we want to get another old hat on.” I said, “well, I’m going to set out this winter but come May I’ll go to work for you.” I sat around and sort of took a little vacation. Then I worked for them in May and worked for them until I was 70 years old. I am 77 now. I think I was 71 when I retired.
I had one of the toughest places to go to. I was staying at Hughes on the Koyukuk and I had that 21
Indian Mountain to go through. It was a 4,000-foot mountain right in front. It was on a 14% grade. There was no way of getting out of there. When you started in that canyon, you landed uphill. There was no way to turn around. You couldn’t turn around because you were right there with a wall on both sides of you. I used to go in there with a Cessna 180 with a 17-knot tail wind. The black bears were thicker than the devil in there. They are too thick everywhere. You never thin them out. In Maine they had a bounty on bears. When I was 14 years old, I was catching and shooting bears to receive the bounty - $5.00. I was getting $5.00 for the skins so that was $10.00 a bear. I would get 5-6 every year. That was a lot of money in those days. Then they took the bounty off and they allowed anybody to shoot a bear anytime they wanted to. They weren’t protected at all. They have just as many bears today as they had then, so what’s the score? The bounty system does no good as far as black bears were concerned.
Evelyn: When you were way out in the boonies and you were flying your own plane, the Swallow, you had no warming facilities like a big heater. How did you keep your aircraft warm?
Sam: Plumbers fire pot. It is like a gasoline heater. It throws a concentrated blue flame, a tremendous amount of heat. It would take about an hour at –45 below to warm up a good-sized motor. We would cover the motor with a tailored cover so as not to lose any heat. You would have to stand by and watch it every minute. There have been quite a lot of airplanes burned up left unattended. About every week you would have to clean the fire pots out otherwise they would go out, again, then shoot up a high long red flame instead of a short blue flame.
((end of Side A, Tape #2))
--start of Side B, Tape #2—
Evelyn: Now the Swallow was a fabric type aircraft and the Monocoupe was a fabric and so was the Fairchild. I guess it wasn’t until around the War that they really started coming out with metal.
Sam: They had an all-metal plane up here in 1929. Wien had it, a Hamilton, a 7-8-place plane. It was the one Ben Eielson got wrecked over in Siberia. The Russians had some planes that were made at that time that were all metal. Later on, in the early 30’s, Nat Brown came up here and he had an all metal Fahlin, low wing. The all metal plane wasn’t anything new in the 30’s but it wasn’t real common. The low wing wasn’t much good up here. You lost performance on takeoff because the wings were too close to the ground. If you had to land where there was a little brush like willows, the low wings would clip the willows. Freight drops on them, people would walk on them. I was down at Ruby one time with the old Swallow and a local character, an Indian, come out and wanted $1.50 to help gas up. I was gassing up and I told him that I didn’t want him around the airplane. I was gassing up for myself. I was pouring in a can of gas and I felt the airplane trembling and I heard a crash and I looked over and he had walked on the lower wing and he put both feet right through. There he was all tangled up in the lower wing. I jumped down and pulled him out and he still wanted $1.50. I booted him off the river. Then I had to cover that wing with canvas and I got to Tanana and had to cover it again and I finally got it into here. I took canvas and drew it around tight, just as tight as I could and sewed it on but the canvas got lose before I got far. I could see little pieces of fabric that was beating up and down. It would come out from under the canvas and float off behind. There was a big hole when I got to Tanana. 22
I had to stay there all night and patch it up again and I froze it on with water. That ice lasted until I got to Minto Flats and then it started to evaporate. Pretty soon, I was losing some more fabric. I finally got it in to Fairbanks. I wouldn’t dare try that now.
Evelyn: Have you ever had any other experiences where you’ve had airplanes falling apart on you?
Sam: One time I started out from here to go to Tanana and something went wrong with the motor. I came back and found that a primer line had broken. We fixed that and I just got over the hill there and something went haywire again. I called them back a second time and they fixed that. I got over the hill there and the doggoned stick came right out of the socket. I looked down there to see what could cause the stick to come out of the socket. The socket was made in two pieces. It had a little thin bolt to hold the pieces together and the bolt had broken. There was just a little stub sticking up. I ducked down and was flying with the stub and I was steaming all the time. I was too mad to turn back. I got down there and somehow I managed a landing on that Tanana field with that stub. I don’t how I did it because when I had a firm grip on that, I couldn’t see up ahead. I had to have my head down in the cockpit. I made it out and just went and got an ordinary stove bolt and made the hole a little bigger. That bolt stayed in there for years. I don’t think I ever did change it. You had to be able to do everything yourself because if you didn’t, you would get stuck somewhere.
I was down in the Tonsona area and Benson was with me. We were checking out a trapline and flying right over the tops of heavy timber following this trapline and we were going to land on a lake. Just as we were over that timber the motor started acting up so we headed for the lake. We pitched a tent, the wind was howling. One of the little bolts that goes through the rock-around, that holds the up and down push rod had broken and let loose that socket in there. That socket had dropped out so the push rod was jumping up and down in there with nothing in there to push against. The exhaust valve wasn’t opening. I got to fooling around there and found out that the bolts that held the cowling on, there were four of them, were the same size length so we put one of them in and our troubles were over. Three bolts would hold the cowling, and one bolt held the rock-around. We were out for a week after that with the same airplane.
Evelyn: Did you find that these older type aircraft seemed to be more sturdy, maintenance wise?
Sam: Yes. The aircraft were, the engines weren’t. The engines were no way near as reliable, but they weren’t as complicated either. They gave us quite a bit of trouble. They didn’t have the metal in those days that they had in the later engines. They turned the engines up to 1750. We thought that was fast. A little later they turned them up to 1850, a little later to 2200, then 2650. We just couldn’t believe that. You felt like pulling way back on the throttle, scared you to death. We found out that if you turned them up just the way they said with the right manifold pressure, the engines would last longer that way. The operating temperatures were just right. An aircraft engine is made up out of a lot of alloys and each one of them has a different expansion co-efficiency. One alloy will expand a lot more than the other will, consequently, when you put the engine together before it is ever run, they leave a little tolerance there. When you start the engine up they run rough but as they get up to operating temperature, they begin to fit then you have a smooth running engine. 23
Evelyn: Did you ever have any trouble when you were flying with any of your passengers?
Sam: Yes, two or three times. One guy thought he was going to take over and land for me coming into Eagle during a very windy day. We came down the hill; we didn’t have a field. It was just a makeshift. The wind was blowing and he was not going to land but he was also under arrest for illegal trapping. I just showed him the cold end of a 22 automatic pistol right under his jaw and he found out quick and I went ahead and landed.
I was in a village one time and they said they had a passenger that they wanted me to take out. I was a little suspicious and asked what was the matter. I told them I had all the load that I wanted to bother with. They said, "well, this man is sick and we want you to take him out.” I told them that if he was sick, that was different. I would leave some of my gear and take him. Come to find out, he was crazy but they weren’t telling me. I didn’t find that out until I got him in the air. He chewed the arm off one of the windowsills. He kept chewing on that and shooting off his face. I had a pretty husky passenger in the back seat and he saw what the score was right away. He didn’t let him get out of control. I handed the fire extinguisher back to him.
When I was at Hughes, they called up on the radio one day and said they had a man over there going off his rocker and wanted me to come over and get him. I said, “no, if 40 men there can’t control him on the ground, I can’t control him in an airplane.” So, I wouldn’t go over. The next day, they decided to keep him because he was a cook. The trouble was they had gotten on a big drunk and he had a touch of “DT’s.”
Evelyn: Early on, you were talking about how you navigated by memorizing the drainages, etc. There were no radio aides or nav aides of any kind at that time, were there?
Sam: No. There were a few at the beginning of the war. The routes from here to McGrath and from here to Nome was covered and that was about it. They were putting in a route to Koyukuk up to Bettles but that didn’t do you any good cause that only covered a little bit of the interior. The Army flights were longer than that. To begin with we had no radios at all. We just had the bare airplane; no instruments, no nothing. I never made enough money to get an instrument rating. I never wanted one anyway. I didn’t like the idea of a guy sitting back where I couldn’t see him telling me what to do. I’d rather do it myself. They are good guys, don’t get me wrong. You know Bill Taylor that was killed there in Anchorage when the earthquake fell. He was a good friend of mine. I knew him from the time he was nine years old. He was up here just about a month or so before that. We had a nice visit here. He was a good man. He was an expert in air traffic business. I saw him change from a boy to a man and a real good man too.
Evelyn: Why don’t you, between now and fall, when we hope Theron (Smith) and Ray (Tremblay) can come up, if you think of something, why don’t you just jot it down as it comes to you. This is filling up some tremendous holes. I hear there was a newspaper article on you recently. Do you have the dates on that? Oh, yes, March 13, 1968.
When I was telling you earlier about working for the Coastal Survey, when they came up here to work the next time, which was in 1942, they were going to do their work with airplanes. They had never tried it. They requested me for their pilot and I happened to be working for Wien so 24
Wien got the contract. I was flying the same personnel that I worked with in the earlier days. For several years, I flew them. As a result of that, the Air Force Geodesics wanted me for a pilot so Wien got those contracts too until they goofed up on them and then I got the contract for awhile. Then I got the contracts for the Coastal Survey. I flew them down to Bristol Bay, and all over the country on my own. That was when I was running my own outfit over in Kotzebue. I did pretty well after several years but maintenance got me in the end. I just couldn’t make out anymore. The price for airplanes never went up but the price for maintenance did go up. I used to get underbid consistently. They knew what I would bid. I wouldn’t bid any cheaper than I had ever flown. I wouldn’t put in a cheaper bid just to get a contract. I would get underbid but I would wind up with the contract anyway. Those fellows back in Washington, D.C. wanted me on the job because I’d never had no accidents and nobody had gotten hurt.
Then they started getting a new crop of commanders. The old crop of commanders that I knew were retiring and they were getting a new crop. They thought this cheaper flying would be the real ticket. That year they accepted some bids from the outside from fellows that didn’t even have airplanes. I did bid but I didn’t get the bid. Jack Peck in Anchorage underbid me. I let him have it. I had this deal with the Geological over on the Kobuk and it was a better contract all the way through. I got by that summer just fine. The next year I was back with the Coastal Survey. They had wrecked too many airplanes and broken some legs and the commander and the pilot got killed in the park. When a Coastal Survey officer gets killed, that is worse than killing a hundred men. They take that to heart terribly when a Coastal Survey officer gets killed. They found him in Bristol Bay. They had a light Taylorcraft on the job. The pilot was all right but that Bristol Bay area was no place for a Taylorcraft or a Cub either. They tried to take off, got into a wind and turned over. They floated five miles out into the ocean beyond Hagemeister Island. They floated back by the Island and into Togiak Bay and they floated so close to the Island that his passenger said he was going to swim to the Island. He said, “I’m a good swimmer.” The pilot tried to get him to hang onto the float. Just the bottom of the float was sticking up, the engine was underwater. The fellow started swimming and he didn’t make it. He drowned. The airplane floated back into Togiak Bay and hung up on some rock. They picked it up the next morning. The pilot was still alive in all that cold water. That water was cold in the Bering Sea! I don’t know how he ever made it, a night and a day but he did.
In all the flying, I did more flying for them than any one pilot; I never ever scratched anybody up. I was awful careful not to do that. I did take some chances. You have to when you are flying. You got to figure it out and then do just the way you figure it.
Evelyn: When you didn’t have any radio aides, what did you do about weather?
Sam: One day there at Point Heiden, little Gene Effler was flying Stinson, Jr. and he went out and he had two men with him. I had been to this lake that he was going out to. I had three working parties out and I saw the storm coming up. I told the boss that I thought I’d better get my men in cause it looked like a bad one. They come up quick there. I just got my men in and the wind was blowing 50 miles an hour. Then this fellow didn’t come in. He was out at the other lake. The winds got stronger to 65 miles an hour. I was the only one that had an airplane there that could do it. It was a strong one, really put together. I had all kinds of gadgets on it. There were no trees down there. It was dark, raining like mad and the wind blowing 55 mph, with gusts up to 65 mph. It was reported right there at Port Heiden radio. I told the boss that I would go out and look for 25
him but I didn’t know if I could bring him back or not but I would try. I could follow the shoreline; I could see the surface of the water and wet mud. I had to go eight miles across the tundra to this lake and I couldn’t see nothing much. I took a compass course for that and by golly I came right out over the lake. I had been there before. I first circled around the lake and I didn’t see nothing. The next circle around the lake, I spotted the airplane in the middle of the lake with the floats sticking up. I made another circle and I finally spotted them on the beach. They were able to make a couple of flashes from a flashlight that had gotten wet. There were three of them there. I could only haul two of them out of there. The waves were very high. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I landed. I picked up two of them, the pilot and one passenger. This one passenger had been in three different wrecks that summer. The other fellow, he was Jack Chamberlain. He was a 200 pounder, six feet plus tall and he had been a B-29 pilot during the war. He was very much amazed at the kind of flying I was doing. He said, “one minute you say you are following the river, the next minute, you’re up and down all over the place.” I said, “well, maybe there is a reason for that.” He wouldn’t discuss it. He was so disgusted with it all. I told him to stay right here! Don’t leave this beach! I’ll be right back. He said, “oh, you won’t be back here tonight, I don’t see how you found it this time.” I said, “I’m coming back tonight to pick you up and don’t you leave this beach.”
They had seen five big bears. The grass was shoulder high. The bears would come up out of the grass and look at them then drop back down into the grass. I took the passengers in and the whole camp was out when I got back and they helped me beach the plane. I needed a lot of help with that wind. I went right back and picked up Chamberlain and got him out of there. The next morning I met him outside the tents there. He came over and shook hands with me. He said, “thanks a lot, I have revised my opinion of bush pilots.” I told him that was nice, that his opinion needed a little revising. He was a pretty good fellow when you got to know him but you never got to know him until he needed some help. We had no trouble with the bears. They left us alone. They would come through camp once in awhile and they never bothered us.
Evelyn: I was going to ask you – when you were out on the trails if you ever had any encounters with animals.
Sam: Yes, I had three bear fights; two with grizzlies and one with a brown bear. When a man has a 30-06, you don’t have anything to worry about. If you can get in one good shot, that’s all you need. You run onto them and startle them. A grizzly will jump you. They get offended awful easy but a brown bear, they are placid. We never had no trouble with them. Grizzlies are unpredictable and they can tip over a jeep too. The superintendent's son down at the park had a jeep with a plywood cab on it that he made himself. He went out and parked it up on a knoll with a lot of brush around. He was gone awhile and he come back and he got into the jeep and started the engine. He had seen nothing nor heard nothing and he made two feet ahead and suddenly the hind wheels left the ground, went backwards and was set over two feet to one side. There was an awful racket in the cab. It felt like the cab was coming off. He didn’t know what was coming off. He gunned it again and he was in four-wheel drive and the same thing happened again. He really took off then, something hit the cab but he kept on going. He got down to headquarters and they looked at the cab and there were bear claws all over the outside of that jeep. That bear just grabbed it and pulled it backwards! One bear has the strength of about 20 men. I’ve slept right in their trails. I would just crawl into my sleeping bag and go to sleep right under a tree but I would have a gun right where I could grab it. 26
Evelyn: How long at a time were you out?
Sam: I was out all different times, three weeks, five-six weeks. When I was flying with the Coastal Survey I was out all summer. When I was out with the Geological, I was out all summer. When I was on my enforcement job, we would be out months at a time.
Evelyn: I just noticed this – Centennial Bush Pilot, Sam White. I’m sure you think quite a lot of that.
Sam: You know the paintings of the bush pilots down at the college that were all destroyed?
Evelyn: The ones that used to hang down in Anchorage? They didn’t salvage too many of them. Was your picture in there?
Sam: Yes, from the earthquake.
One morning when we were in Bristol Bay, I took a working party out and we went over to a tent where there was another working party. They had been put out there on the tundra with a weasel and as we flew over this camp, we noticed a great big brown bear sniffing the tent with the two men inside sound asleep. We knew we had to go down there and drive that bear away. We flew low and gave the engine full power and I got the bear going up over the hill, I passed over the tent two-three times and drove the bear up over the hill. When those fellows woke up, they didn’t even know the bear had been there and didn’t even know I had flown over several times. Those light-keepers could sleep soundly. They were the oddest bunch of men you’ve ever seen, those light-keepers. They had nothing to do but lay in that tent until they got a good night then they would sit on the mountain all night and shine their light.
--looking at lots of pictures-- Sam says he has lots of pictures!
Evelyn: This Rampart, is this up in the Rampart Canyon?
Sam: It’s way above that. It’s on the Porcupine. Rampart House is right on the Canadian Border. It is abandoned now. Thirty miles above there is Old Crow on the Canadian side.
Evelyn: The town of Chena – now washed out and into the Tanana.
Sam: Yes. In the beginning they had quite a battle as to whether the main town would be in Fairbanks or at Chena. The reason that Fairbanks won out was that Dean Wickersham, a big politician there in those days owned a lot of ground in Fairbanks and if Chena got to be the town, he would have anything. It was a good thing that it went the way that it did because there is no ground there where Chena is now. The Tanana River, that is what’s menacing this town. It is edging this way all the time towards Fairbanks and it is only six miles away. The Tanana River bed is getting higher ever year. The water level of the Tanana River is three feet higher than Fairbanks. It is swift water above Fairbanks from Big Delta on down. It is very swift and it brings down a lot of gravel and muck and it dumps it where the river slows up right out here. Geological Survey knows all about it and one of these days, the Tanana River is going to be right 27
here in this town. I noticed it and a few old timers had made the same deduction. The rest of them hadn’t noticed it or didn’t care. Now they are beginning to think about it. This was all conducive to the terrible flood that we had last year. It was Tanana water running across the road into the Chena because I recognized the color of it. I can tell Chena water from Tanana water. Tanana water is heavy with silt and it is a certain color.
Some of those pictures were taken back in the 1900’s. I just happened to get hold of them.
((end of Side B, Tape #2))
--start of Side A, Tape #3—
Evelyn: From looking at all these old pictures, it is hard to imagine this place being so active all these years. You kind of felt it had been dormant but these pictures show that to be far from the way it really was. All of those folks, including you, had to be hearty souls.
Sam: They took $300,000,000 worth of gold from Cripple Creek and they probably took a like amount out of Gold Stream then they took a lot more out of the quarry.
Evelyn: Here’s a picture on the Stromberger case – 2 cow moose, 2 caribou, 51 mountain sheep, 3 set-guns and 2 market hunters, December 1939. Those were the good old days, I guess. At least when you apprehended somebody you could bring them into court and not have it thrown out.
Sam: We used to have some funny instances in court. One place I brought a fellow in and the Commissioner had the warrant there and said, “are you guilty – you must be or you wouldn’t be here – you get three months!”
Did you ever hear about Mt. Spur blowing up a few years ago? I was right there, 35 miles away. We were on the other side and it wasn’t too bad there. We didn’t get ash there. I was flying from Iliamna to Whitefish Lake every day hauling gasoline to helicopters. The day before it blew, I was smelling battery acid all day long and I thought my battery was haywire. I checked things out and everything seemed to be all right. I opened the window and the odor got stronger and that morning about 2:00 a.m., Mt. Spur blew up. It was sulfuric acid from the mountain that I was smelling. I didn’t know it at the time but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. We didn’t see it blow because there was heavy fog and later in the day it cleared up. The smoke and steam reached an altitude of 40,000 feet. Then I was making a trip down to Iliamna and I detoured over to get near it and I could see what looked to be a rock, a glowing object bigger than this house. It went into the air with a terrible rumble. It was red hot. It came down in a snow bank. When that hit the snow bank there was nothing to be seen. The whole area fogged in. I looked for that snow bank later when it cleared up, but there was no snow bank there anymore, it had all gone up in steam.
There is a picture of my wife, my sister, and my three boys. One of them is a lieutenant with the State Police in Maine. He was in World War II and was wounded, recovered and went back and was in the last battle they had in Italy. He was over there three years. His name was Allen, the youngest. Vernon wasn’t in, but Jessie was in England for 1-1/2 years as a radio technician on the 28
aircrafts and he also had to unload the wounded and the dead out of the airplanes. It affected him pretty bad. He doesn’t want to go near an airplane and he won’t do radio work anymore. I had two sisters, but the one in the picture; she and I are the only two kids out of ten that are alive. My last brother died a little less than a year ago. He and two of his sons died within a week – Emphysema. Maine was a miserable climate.
Evelyn: Did you do any trapping?
Sam: I trapped the first year I was in the country. This was before I went with the Service. I was with the Coastal Survey in the summer and in the winter I had nothing to do. There were no jobs in Alaska the first two-three years I was here. I came here in 1922 but didn’t go with the Bureau until 1927. The Bureau was just two years old when I went with them. They hadn’t had a chance to get started. They had very little information about interior Alaska. They were just organizing, that first two years. They were doing some work too but they were handicapped because they had no information. I never had any enforcement experience up to this time but I had grown up figuring that the law was the law and it ought to be that way because that’s the only way you could maintain civilization. I didn’t get much training; I mainly just struck out on my own. I was shown how to do the paperwork, etc.
The caribou used to go right through town here. They used to block the highway so you would have to wait for them to get on through. They would block the airport and you would have to wait for them there too. I’ve been on a steamboat on the Yukon where the caribou would be so thick that we couldn’t go through the masses of them. You would just go ashore and tie up and wait for them to go on by. If you got amongst them and the antlers got caught in the paddle wheel, then off comes the paddle blades so it was too dangerous to take that chance of going through them. Sometimes, you would be tied up for one-two hours. You would untie, go on down the river and run into another bunch. Countless, hundreds of thousands of them! The biologists thought they were going to starve to death but the millions of them then, they weren’t starving, I don’t know why they should now. Suppose a few did starve to death, what harm would that do? I was out here on the Taylor highway when they first opened it up. I came around a bend, I heard a lot of shooting and there were 30-40 cars up ahead of me all stopped. The doors were wide open, you couldn’t go by. People were shooting, hollering, screaming, caribou tumbling all over the side of the hill, crippling into the brush. They must have killed at least 100 of them there. It was like a battlefield. I saw a dust cloud and a fellow came down from up ahead. He got out of his car and he hollered, “come on up here, there is more of them up here.” They all took off and never touched one of those caribou that they had just slaughtered. I stayed there four hours and no one ever came back.
When I returned to town, I hunted up Jones, a biologist, and I told him about it. I told him that somebody better get up there and do something about that. That is just going too far! He said, “well, I’ll tell you, we got to take 6,000 animals out of that herd this fall and this is the only way we know how to do it.” I said, “you are encouraging everybody to violate the law that you are supposed to enforce.” He said, “well, yes, but we have to do it. We have got to kill that many caribou or they will starve to death this winter.” I said, “they didn’t use to starve to death up here.” I told him that I thought he and the others were all wrong. It didn’t seem to worry the Game Commission one bit that the meat was just left there and not attended to.
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Then at Eagle, there was always a big migration there every spring and every fall. North of the Yukon, there is no closed season on caribou and no bag limit. The tourists would come into Eagle, meet that migration on the north shore of the Yukon and they would shoot it up. The caribou then, turn around and go back. They were cutting off the migration route. It has been four years since there has been a migration across the Yukon because of that. That’s dangerous when they don’t travel because that’s when they begin to fade out. Almost every instinct of the caribou, mating and all, is tied up in the migration process. They have the same problem over in Canada. They got some independent traders in there and they got some repeating rifles and the caribou lasted just four years. They had a super abundance of caribou, then four years later, nothing.
Evelyn: You mentioned earlier that you were on skis. Did you physically use skis?
Sam: Yes, driving dogs. You stand on the skis and the towlines run between your feet. That’s the only way you can keep up with the dogs. You had a sled right behind you, several hundred pounds of it. They had a few people to get killed that way. If you fell down, the sled ran right over you. When things got out of control, I went over headfirst in the snow and left the skis. I used to be pretty quick on my feet in those days.
Evelyn: A picture here - the start of the Tanana-Yukon Patrol by Gren Collins and Sam White. That was in 1937. You had to do that by boat?
Sam: Enid Thompson was a man that was very much looked up to around here. He was deputy marshal and clerk of the courts. I first knew him as a grocery boy. He used to help me a lot when he was deputy marshall. I had one customer that I picked up about once a year. His Russian name was Gregory _______ and he angled it and called himself Pete Smith. He took out a license in each name then he said, “now you can’t touch me, I got two licenses.” I told him that wouldn’t do him any good. I took his licenses because he didn’t even have citizenship papers. I took a set of guns off him. Aliens weren’t supposed to have guns under the old Alaska game laws. I would relieve him of his guns every fall. Then one day I was coming in and Enid Thompson was with me. We met this guy and I said, “I’ve been wanting to catch him on the road and I’m going to look him over again.” We turned around and took after him. He saw us coming and he put on the speed. We drove him into a dead-end wood row. We kept right close to him and Thompson was watching closely to see that he didn’t throw anything out. He finally went as far as he could go on the road. I got out and asked him if he had any guns with him and he said, “oh no, you know I wouldn’t do that anymore, I know better than that now.” I told him to get out of his car, that I was going to take a look. He had a brand new shot gun, a brand new 30-06 and a brand new 22 rifle. I said, “oh, Pete, you big liar!” He said, “this damn country is no good, I’m going back to Russia.” I said, “you tried that once and they wouldn’t have you, you had just better stay put.” He had tried to return to Russia earlier and they kicked him out, they wouldn’t have him back. It cost him about $150 in addition to losing his guns. He had no use for the U.S. government. He couldn’t get citizenship papers. He used to live right where the runways are at Fort Wainwright. That was a moose pasture. I would always watch him closely because he was always poaching moose. I would go out there and relieve him of his guns. The marshall went out there one day and he pulled a 30-30 carbine on the marshall. That was a big mistake. He had more guns pointing at him before he could say “scat.” They brought him in and he got a year and a day in jail for that. He never could get citizenship. 30
Evelyn: Sam, why don’t I read some of these articles into the record that I won’t be able to get a copy of.
Daily Alaska Empire – Sunday, March 23, 1941
Title: Flying Game Warden, Sam White Tells All
The law was spread pretty thin over 100,000 square miles of wilderness in the Yukon and Tanana River basins when Sam White, the game warden, dug down into his own pockets and bought himself an airplane. That was 12 years ago. Even rickety old crates were scarce in the territory and retribution came slowly, if at all, to poachers and alien interlopers who slaughtered Alaska’s valuable game in regions reached only by riverboats, dog teams, or snowshoe trails. “Some of those folks” Sam said, “acted like the whole country belonged to them and I guess it did for awhile. They are learning better now. The law is still spread pretty thin, I guess, but it reaches further and faster than it used to.”
The veteran Alaska game commission employee, first flying warden in this hemisphere, told a story to reporters in Washington last August, that caused considerable prodding and press correspondence of the new Fish and Wildlife Service of the Interior Department. Sam had gone to Washington to ferry back to Alaska a new radio-equipped four-placed airplane, a far cry from the old machine he bought from his own hard earned savings back in 1929. Sam bought the first two airplanes he used. In all, he spent $13,000 for flying equipment, hangars, etc., although, as he explains “the government bought my gasoline.” For several years now, the government has been flying three Alaska game wardens. At first by charter and later through federal purchase.
“Tell the boys about that border smuggling racket you broke up,” said a press agent. “Aw” grinned Sam, who began a career as woodsman at the age of 16 as a guide in the Maine backcountry.
Just Another Trip - It seems that some tough citizens had been poisoning wolves and coyotes in nearby Canada and smuggling their pelts across the border to collect $20 bounties, ordered for predatory beef by the territorial government. The territory had no investigators and called upon the Game Commission for help. Sam flew to Dawson to organize a boundary patrol. “At Dawson, they gave me a Northwest Mounted Policeman to help, Constable, W.W. Sutherland, only a few years out of England. We flew over the backcountry and the trading post, getting the lay of the land. At one of those places, at Snag River, we found 84 wolf pelts. They had been skinned with the leg bone inside, a requirement for the $20 bounty being paid in Alaska. We seized the pelts. Back at Dawson, we got the names of trappers who had bought poison from drug stores then we looked for them in the backcountry. Those fellows would put out strychnine bait and contaminate a whole region rich in animal and bird life. The birds fly off and die and their bodies become new poison bait for animals. One man spreading poison can kill all the animals in a big area. He collects only a few pelts in the animals he destroys. They crawl off and die in hiding or the snow blows over their bodies.
Went in on snowshoes – On Nation Rivers, there were only three men, one of them, a tough Scandinavian we suspected. We cruised the river without finding a place to land. The nearest place was 35 miles away and I went in on snowshoes. I located our man and went back for 31
Sutherland. We brought out a dog team for the return trip. The fellow who had killed out all the animals in that section was leaving with his pelts and what remained of his poison. The Mounty and I took him across the border into Canada. The Canadian laws also prohibit poison and, of course, enforce the law. Too, when they sentence a man he worked it out in the “Royal Woodpile.” Our Scandinavian didn’t poison anymore animals for a long time.
Aliens in the Yukon – Sam told of going after an alien in the Yukon Valley wanted by the Mounties for cache robberies. A major offense in a country where trail food stores may be the life or death for the traveler. The flyer located the man several times in the air only to lose him when he landed. He continued the chase on snowshoes. The fugitive took to the hills. Sam returned to the nearest cabin and borrowed a dog team. The man who went back with him explained the fugitive was crazy. The two finally captured the trapper, took him to the plane and strapped him in the front seat. “When we got the engine started, we had to hurry,” Sam said. It was –30 degrees below zero and a high wind was blowing. I never learned until later that my prisoner had threatened to kill me in the airplane. The fellow kept poking at the instrument board. He threatened to take over the controls and fly himself. The nearest landing place was beside a steep mountain. I had to slide in between two buildings and a grove of trees. Maybe that crazy landing saved my life. It scared the prisoner pretty badly. After we landed, he shouted at me, “just think what would have happened to you if I had grabbed the controls back there.”
Rescue Trapper – On another occasion, a wildlife agent landed on a mountain near a cabin in which a trapper had an ulcerated tooth and was near death. Sam, in choosing his landing place, hadn’t figured on getting off with a load. He broke a ski pulling his ship in the air but managed to land safely at Fairbanks, Sam’s headquarters. They operated on the trapper that day and after he got well, he wanted to give me all the furs in his caches. For most of the year, Sam flies with skis on. Deep snow increases the number of possible places to land. In 12 years of wilderness flying, he has had six forced landings. “It must be frightfully uncomfortable in that cold,” commented a girl reporter, “sitting there waiting for them to rescue you.” “Lady,” said Sam, “where I come from you don’t wait for a rescue, you just tie everything down and start walking.” “Don’t you have a two-way radio in your plane?” “In the new one, yes, but not before,” replied Sam. “But,” the girl retorted, “even the Australian police, I’m told, find it impossible to fly over wild country without radio equipment.” “Maybe it is impossible lady,” said Sam, “but that’s what we have been doing for the past ten years in Alaska.”
--end of reading from the Juneau article—
The following is from the Outdoor Life Magazine, June 1946, page 34.
Wardens with Wings by Rob S. Sanderson, photos by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
--Recent missions have been flown either in two-place Monocoupe, one of which is shown above or in larger three-four-place Fairchild.-- (this is sub-title under picture of Monocoupe)
“The use of airplanes for conservation enforcement work in this age of flight has been hailed as a great new idea, untried, but full of promise. Such is not the case. The idea has been thoroughly tried and has more than fulfilled its promise. As a matter of fact, pilot/agents for the Alaska Game Commission have used planes for more than 15 years and have not only proved that they are 32
practical and economical but have established a remarkable record for safety and efficiency.
When and how did the airplane idea start? In 1929, four years after the Alaska Game Commission was founded, one of its agents, Sam O. White, bought himself an old Swallow bi-plane and began roaring around the skies above Fairbanks, teaching himself to fly. White put the plane on skis, began using it on his patrols and so became the terror of the backcountry poachers. His enforcement record convinced skeptics, and in 1932, Congress was prevailed upon to pass legislation empowering the Alaska Game Commission to purchase, own, and operate planes. Since that time, the agents have been fairly well supplied. Today, airplanes are indispensable for Alaska operations. Without their wings, it would be like working in a horseless cow country. In 1943, for example, a skeleton staff of ten agents and two administrative men were responsible for patrols covering 590,884 square miles or an average of 49,240 for each officer. That year Alaska was flooded with newcomers who lived outdoors and had access to guns. There were men in uniform, men in labor camps, and men in technical corps. The resulting enforcement crises was one of the biggest in Alaska’s history. In speaking of the tremendous job done by its agents, the Alaska Game Commission frankly states: Their work would have been impossible to accomplish without the use of five commissioned airplanes. With many former employees back from serving in the armed forces, the air enforcement fleet will soon mushroom. Three main air bases at Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Ketchikan were already established before Pearl Harbor but the coming of the war in 1941 halted all expansions and retractions set in as personnel was lost. Simultaneously, the enforcement problem increased. Now the Commission is free to move ahead with the backlog of ideas accumulated since 1940. When it published this statement in its annual report, “airplanes flown by Commission officers are by far the most effective and economical method yet devised for enforcing the fur and game laws and for checking on the wildlife in Alaska. Airplanes account for more travel in this work than any other means of transportation. For years, the dog team was the standby for land travel. By 1943, dog team miles fell to 675 for the year, whereas, air patrols covered 120,031 miles.”
In spring and fall when other transportation is difficult or impossible, plane travel is particularly important to the enforcement work. In former years, poachers chose these seasons for their worst depredations knowing they would be beyond the law’s reach in most cases. Nowadays, they can never rest easy for they know that a flying agent may come out of the blue in the wink of an eye.
After White bought his Swallow, one of the first enforcement problems he tackled was that of illegal trap lines. By dog team, it took a full week of hard travel to visit the trapping camp only 100 miles away. With his plane, he could do the job in three hours. A snowshoe trail was easily followed from the air and within a short distance, an experienced warden can tell not only whether the snowshoer is trapping or hunting but
((end of Side A, Tape #3))
((start of Side B, Tape #3)
also what game or fur he seeks. A trap line along the timbered high ridges is set for marten. A line along small streams is for mink and otter. A trail that visits all the beaver ponds in the green vicinity suggests a beaver trapper. By flying low, the warden can tell about how many traps a mile are used and how often the line is run. Law abiding trappers welcomed visits from the Commission’s plane if only to break the monotony of the short Arctic days. Besides, they like 33
assurance that if a flying agent notices the trap lines have not been run recently, he will land to make sure that the trapper is not succumbed to sickness, cold, or foul play.
Wood dwellers in distress or with important information for the agent signals to the plane by placing cut spruce boughs on the snow to spell the desired words, such as L-A-N-D and often lay out an arrow pointing to the nearest spot which could be made to serve as a runway. These spruce bough messages to pilots are common and by their use, information can be delivered to agents even if the signal marker is not at home when the plane arrives. In return, the pilot drops notes or late newspapers to these isolated humans. Such patrols perform the mission while simultaneously keeping poachers and renegade trappers under control and thus protecting lawful operators from illegal competition. Complete control coverage is not possible with the present small enforcement unit and illegal operations still exist much as they did in the late autumn of 1941 when flying agents made a surprise airplane patrol of the lower Yukon River district. In three weeks, agents seized more than 3,000 unprimed muskrats, mink, and fox pelts from several traders in the area. If this trip had been made by riverboat, the only other possible transportation, the grapevine would have spread a warning in advance of the agents and the furs would have been tucked out of sight before they arrived. Fur seizures have run as high in value as $18,000 annually, however, they have diminished somewhat in recent years because of the discouraging affect of the highly efficient plane patrols upon illegal operators. Outlaw hunters can be detected from the air almost as easily as outlaw trappers.
In November of 1940, after several hours of air reconnaissance in the Mt. Hayes area, flying agents landed their plane in a clearing nearest an alien cabin and set out on snow shoes for their objective several miles further on. At the cabin, they discovered the remains of at least 21 animals – moose, caribou, and mountain sheep included. A good deal of the meat, all recently killed, had spoiled and some of it had been fed to the dogs. Needless to say, the alien got a free plane ride to Fairbanks where he was prosecuted to the limit. Agents traveling on snowshoes often required weeks to investigate a single suspect. Now, a few days plane trip will usually clear up an entire area. As an example, in 1939, in the course of a 30-day flying patrol which took them to the Alaska-Yukon border country, pilot/wardens completed seven cases, and in cooperation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, started action against several violators on the Canadian side of the line. One defendant, a flagrant poisoner, admitted using 24 bottles of strychnine in three years. In the Dawson area, a fur smuggler was caught red-handed with 84 coyote and wolf skins ready to be sneaked across from the Yukon where no bounty was in effect. Once over the line, he planned to collect Alaska bounty illegally and smuggle U.S. tobacco or other goods back into Yukon on the returning dog team.
Keeping the plane flying in 60 below zero weather is not easy. Especially designed closed cowlings prevents the cylinders from cooling below minimum operation limits but as soon as an engine is turned off, the oil must be immediately drained. If left, it will congeal within minutes to a tar-like goo. Before starting again after a stop for several hours, a canvas hood is placed over the plane’s power plant to keep the heat in and the gas burning fire pot lighted underneath. When the motor thaws, perhaps two hours later, the cylinder oil is heated over a flame until it bubbles and it is then poured into the crankcase. If the engine fails to start at once, the ritual must be repeated. Are planes worth all of this trouble? Well, in terms of areas covered, one hour by plane is worth three hard days by dog team.
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In the first years of operation, many planes were forced down. From these experiences, wardens gathered a wealth of first hand data on surviving in the cold after a forced landing. Much of this hard won information went into the Army’s distress handbook for downed flyers and many an airman owes his knowledge of how to make signals, keep from freezing, find food, and locate the nearest inhabitants to the information passed down by Alaska’s conservation agency.
They are a resourceful lot, these men. For instance, Sam White had a sudden engine failure over a swamp. Instantly selecting a favorable opening, he completed a successful forced landing, erected an emergency shelter, and set out signals to any passing planes. By and by, a fellow pilot spotted these signals, flew to the nearest town and sent a dog team to his aid. When the rescuers arrived, White helped them remove the engine and load it onto the sled, then they took it and him to town. After supervising the repairs, he returned to his plane, reinstalled the motor and flew home.
Ray Renshaw is another experienced agent and pilot who has had close calls. He was ferrying a new Monocoupe from the states when he encountered bad weather in the Yukon Territory, which blew the plane off its course and eventually forced it down because of heavy icing conditions. Luckily, a gravel bar along a river provided an emergency landing strip. It was the fall of the year and winter in the north comes early. Renshaw was not sure of his position and although the ship had a radio, it was impossible for him to direct searchers accurately. Which way to go for help was also a mystery so he decided to stay right where he was and burrow in for the long stay. Preparing a dugout in the sand, he lined it with spruce boughs then hold up in a sleeping bag. It was well that he did all this for soon the temperature dropped to 30 degrees below zero. Two weeks passed during which Renshaw eked out his emergency rations by snaring game for food. He was feeling as much at home as a snowshoe rabbit and more snow had fallen when one day he heard the faint drone of an airplane engine. In the distance, a Pan American airliner crossed the white peaked mountains and disappeared beyond the cold horizon. Immediately, Renshaw warmed up his radio and sent the exact time he saw the plane and his location in relation to its course. The transmitter was weak but a radio operator at Whitehorse caught the message and relayed it to the Juneau office of the Alaska Game Commission. Its agents contacted Pan American to ascertain the airliner's position at the precise moment the downed pilot spotted it. A search plane was dispatched immediately, found the Monocoupe and dropped a map with a note telling Renshaw where he was; only 15 miles north of a little town of Celkerk(??) The rescue plane landed in that settlement and the pilot sent a dog team up river. Meanwhile, Renshaw fire potted his engine with a wood fire and a blowtorch and despite the fact that heavy snow covered the ground and more was falling, he managed to coax his heavily iced plane into the air and flew into town, not knowing relief was already coming. The ship was so heavily encrusted with ice when it arrived, the people could not understand how it ever got there. The pilot was thin from his rigorous diet and somewhat weakened from exposure but says he could have held out until spring.
Such experiences support the Commission’s theory – that is easier and better to train woodsmen to be pilots than try to teach pilots to be first class woodsmen. All the pilots are men who have proved their medal on the ground, know the country, and have learned how to fly with the Commission. So far as possible, this policy is to be continued. Usually, of course, the Commission pilots are the rescuers rather than the rescued.
One spectacular job of this kind was undertaken in the spring of 1938 when agents spotted a 35
wreckage of a multi-engine plane among high mountain cliffs. The scene of the crash was at least eight days distance from help by dog team, if indeed a land party could scale the sheer cliffs. In a light two-place Aeronca equipped with skis, two pilots set out. When they landed, the mountain slope proved to be so steep that one pilot held full throttle to keep the ship from sliding backward over the cliff while the other jumped out and roped the airplane down. The pilot of the wrecked craft was suffering from both a broken neck and broken back and they wanted to take him out first. The Aeronca, now facing down slope was held only by a strong rope attached to the tail. At a signal the pilot at the controls blasted full power while the agent staying behind chopped the rope. Down the mountainside like a bullet, the little plane roared just off over the cliff and jumped before a threatening crash in the canyon below, gained flying speed. Within a couple of hours, it returned safety to the wreck where the adventure was repeated. There are many such cases in which the crash victims would perish in the cold, long belong land expeditions could reach them. A plane rescue spelled the difference between eventual safety and disaster.
People are not all the agents rescue. About five years ago, flying in the country west of Mount McKinley, they spotted two bull moose fighting horn to horn out on the ice in the frozen lake. Circling overhead the agents realized that the animals had locked horns. A short time later they returned to the scene with assistance and equipment, landed, and with some difficulty, roped the two moose. That done, they sawed off the interlocking antlers and saved the lives of both animals which otherwise would have died of exposure on the ice or been devoured by wolves.
In the summer months all planes operate off pontoons and in winter from skis, except in the Ketchikan area where there is open water all year round. As the freeze-up in the fall is swift and sharp, the transition time from floats to skis is usually only about five days. Hence, there is little need for regulation wheels except in those years when the freeze comes before the snow. In recent operations, two types of planes have been employed. The speedy two-place 90 hp Monocoupe and the larger three to four-place Fairchild 24. Both are easily adapted to wheels, skis, or floats. Larger types of aircraft now becoming available, presumably will be used in the future for longer hops and heavier loads. The pilots are dreaming, too, about the day when helicopters will see service as they will eliminate the snowshoe trips now necessary in rough country when the destination point lacks level ground for landing.
In this post war era, the Alaska Game Commission will expand its fleet greatly, not only are more aircraft necessary to patrol the vast wilderness adequately, but many hunters and trappers will soon be using planes themselves, introducing a whole new problem. For example, in the area around Anchorage alone, in the 1943 season, 62 small planes were used by hunting parties. More enforcement planes would be needed to keep an adequate check on such parties. So, in this respect at least, Alaska has for several years been facing a problem which will soon be common place in the state. Now that Alaska has set the pace, what are we sportsmen in the Lower 48 states going to do about providing wings for our game wardens? Frank Defense who recently wound up 24 years in Alaska, most of them with the Alaska Game Commission, thinks an airplane is about as practical a possession as a conservation agency can have, and Dufresne knows whereof he speaks. “The individual states are missing a good bet,” he says, “planes would be especially useful in the western states and such areas as the Florida Everglades or our wide coastal marshes.” Dufresne, now at United States Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, is surprised that the idea didn’t catch on long before now.
36
From any viewpoint, the plane is a great asset to conservation. One plane from the air reveals the presence of hunting parties, the direction they are moving, where cars are parked and tents located. And though the warden may not always land, just the knowledge that he is watching from overhead every day or two is enough to discourage most violators.
As our states begin to adopt air patrols, we can expect two stock questions – how safe is it and isn’t it expensive? As to safety, the Alaska Game Commission points out that in all seemingly hazardous operations, not one flyer has been lost or even injured. As to expense, in 1939, one Alaska pilot flew 17,000 miles at the average cost of 3 cents a mile. It is hard to beat a record like that. In addition to law enforcement duties, planes fight fires, make the most accurate waterfowl and big game census obtainable, plant fish, control predators, do rescue work and are useful in breaking up concentrations of ducks wherever the endanger farm crops. With an airplane, administrative officials could make regular trips to all parts of their state and actually see what is going on instead of having to rely largely on annual reports, and they would only be away from the office a few short hours at a time. The idea of a plane for enforcement officers has proved its practicality in one of the toughest natural laboratories that we have.
Within a short time, flying conservation men will be common place. Will your state be among the first to have a Con-Air-vation department? It’s up to you and your fellow sportsmen to see to it that wardens get wings.
--end of article--
Evelyn: I noticed when I was reading this article, they are talking about you buying your plane, it says, “his enforcement record convinced skeptics, and in 1932, Congress was prevailed upon to pass legislation empowering the Alaska Game Commission to purchase and own operate planes. Since that time, the agents have been fairly well supplied.” Actually, even though the legislation was passed, they still wouldn’t buy you an airplane?
Sam: No. I guess the attitude of Dufresne was that “if he wants to fly so damn bad, he’ll do anything.” But that was not my attitude. What I wanted to do was enforce the laws. They wasted so much game; I just couldn’t stand to see the game wasted. Then being a figure head officer, that’s no good. You don’t feel important when you are just going around looking wise, that’s the hardest thing in the world for me to do. You got to do your job and do it conscientiously and with a dog team, you start out to go somewhere and a half dozen other people would tip off everybody that the game warden left Fairbanks with his